Emotional Oxymoron

Love is not something you take. You give it. Love is not something you seek. You find it. Love is not something you can live without. You will die.

Ever noticed how when someone is not being loved they kind of lose it. It's in many movies. I just watched one where a boy is on a team and his father is the coach. But the father favors another player over his son. The next thing you know, this son is destroying everyone around him. It's because he seeks his fathers love, but cannot make his father love him. It's crazy how that works.

In any relationship when you want someone to love you, and they do not, you act in a manner you would not naturally. I recently read that if someone commits suicide it is because they have lost all hope and see no other way out of whatever they are struggling with. Made sense to me. I have had those thoughts from time to time, as I am sure many of you have too. I think it is a natural thing to think, kind of like the idea that this life is really just someone having a dream or something like that. It is just a coping thing we do I think.

So, when we are starving for love, we act weird. Let's face it. But when we are around someone starving, we do not feed them because they are embarassing. You know what I mean. Ever paid attention to someone you were just trying to be nice to for a minute and then they would not let you go until you had to be mean? Well, there is a reason for that. They are ravenous and crazy with it. Somehow, somewhere, they were cut off from a steady supply of love and they are emaciated from it emotionally. It is an ugly sight to see and we tend to run from it because it scares us.

The Mormon Middle Singles Program is full of these people. They have dark circles under their eyes. Dead eyes look out over those dark circles, right above fake smiles. The "Program" keeps feeding them cardboard paper cutout pictures of love with air to drink. Cottonballs are the ice cream dessert. This is neither fulfilling nor is it healthy. Many people will defend the "Program" and I feel sorry for them because they have eaten so much cardboard they think it is manna from heaven because it comes from "above".

Wake up. Smell the coffee, the roses, or the crap on the bottom of your shoe, but wake up. It's Fall and the Holidays are here. You are alone or probably in some pseudo relationship being torn apart by so many things going against you the only chance you have is if we go back to arranged marriages. I recall all my past romances and there was something missing from each and every one of them: ME! I was not involved because I had the wrong idea about what I wanted and how I was supposed to feel and what I was supposed to do. Stop getting advice from people who are clueless or worldly. Get it from the best place. All good things come from the Lord, so ask Him. Then get out of the way when needed or get down and dirty to bring your own happiness to pass.

We each have our agency. We are told that the only thing we have to give the Lord is our will. Well, the only thing we have to give each other is our love. It is a gift. From me to you. From you to me. Sometimes it is above and beyond anything else in life and it brings such joy you hang onto it for an eternity or longer. Do not belittle what the Lord created by stuffing it in a box and trying to make it look like what someone else has. That is denying what is unique about yourself and the other person in your relationship.

Why am I giving advice? Because I am tired of all the soap opera drama that goes on in the Middle Singles Program. I am tired of watching people flinch from anything real because they do not know what real is. Real is something that stays with you for longer than a moment. Real is something that you talk about for years. Real is reliving it and wanting to go back to it. A real activity would have interraction and laughter. A hike on a Saturday morning would do. A co-ed flag football game would do. I want something other than a recycled dance and firesides which do not help me in any other way than to expound my spiritual knowledge of the gospel. I have had enough of that. I want to be alive at a Middle Singles Activity, not feel like a robot. The dance has become the "Johnny One Note" because it's the only thing going. A game night at some one's house with 20 people would be more alive and real than 5,000 dances.

I am tired of watching the Lord's elect be deceived by the adversary and not even know it. Fight back. Remember, we are on the winning team. Act like it.