Love Like You've Never Been Hurt

Watching someone do something you know is wrong is always difficult. Even worse if you think its dumb. As I was flabbergasted at something a friend had just done, my son frowned and said, "You just wrote ‘dance like no one is watching’. Isn’t that what they did?" It gave me pause to think that maybe something I had written was so misinterpreted that my friend had acted without considering the damage to both herself and those around her. This was certainly more than dancing in the kitchen. Yet, the next line kept echoing through my head. To love like you’ve never been hurt.

Immediately it brings to mind romantic love. And, yes, great wisdom resides in that view. I have several close friends that were burned at age 17 to go through the rest of their lives afraid to get their heart too involved again. They go through life from partner to partner, finally settling down with someone that fits the bill of wife and kids, but doesn’t set their heart on fire. Never listening when told that everyone gets burned at 17. And then at 18 and 19 and on and on. It’s not a reason to pack up your heart. One dear friend had a 25 year marriage crumble, but found it in herself to throw her heart back in the arena, and, at age 55, found the love of her life.

Love, though, exists in so many ways. We can let it damage us. And then as we nurse our wounds through dysfunctional lives, we can come to terms with it on Dr. Phil or Jerry Springer. Without those damaged souls we would never be able to watch 800 pound, schizophrenic, leather clad, adult children of drug addicts smash chairs on each other’s heads as we sit entranced at the TV in the lobby of Willis Knighton. Without dysfunctional people to watch, we would be forced to watch something like C-Span and after 15 minutes of intense boredom, decide to walk out and find a new doctor. Or maybe get a how-to book on performing a personal tonsillectomy.

It is the ability to love like you’ve never been hurt that allows frustrated teenagers, while one moment pounding their pillows and hurling invectives at the parents behind the door, to grow into adults that so lovingly embrace the elderly, wasted bodies of those same parents. That allows them to willingly lose night after night of sleep from nursing a sick mother, to make one more attempt at feeding her when she won’t eat, and cajole one more dose of medicine into someone that has given up on life.

And how we all grow into those parents on the other side of the door, holding our heads in confounded grief as those once sweet little babies give us a new education on just how bad we can feel. Making us yearn for the days when a tantrum was the kicking and screaming as we pulled chubby little bodies off the swingset at the duck pond when it was time to go home. Now their anger is more hurtful, their arrows are more well placed, but we will get over each hump and face each new day ready to hug again the once chubby bodies and rain more kisses on the once round, pink cheeks, while knowing someday, in about twenty years, they will finally understand.

It’s that same ability to love that keeps the faithful kneeling again to pray when it seems like life couldn’t be worse and Providence must certainly have forgotten who we are. That same ability to forgive where a sometimes angry husband offers his shoulder to his wife to cry on while outside that teenaged door. And that ability to understand and not run outside with a chainsaw when that lady down the street uses my front yard as her dog’s bathroom again instead of her own. Well, it could be my human understanding or possibly my intense fear of Angola Prison. Maybe I should hang plastic bags on my mailbox.

But just by Dr. Phil’s popularity, we must not all have taken those few lines to heart. That ability to pull ourselves upright from lying face down in the mud, and straighten our spines, and walk back inside. So we can turn up the radio, throw back our heads, and dance like no one is watching. This gives us the strength to dust ourselves off and walk back into life’s arena to love like we’ve never been hurt.