The word love makes me think of the Beatles song,
All You Need is Love. I blame it on my parents. Their choice of music while I was growing up
in their home was AMAZING! Thanks to
them my sisters and I are able to appreciate a small amount of music that is
incomparable to the tunes we listen to these days.
So all you need is
love…right? Well, that’s not what Maslow
thinks. He says our basic needs are
physiological and has this whole pyramid to show what
motivates people. It’s a very
interesting concept and I believe there is some truth to what he says.
I think that I do desire
food and clothing and a roof over my head.
But I think about people all over the world who don’t have that. If we open our eyes these situations are all
around us AND the very people in those situations are living. We even see them smiling and running and
bubbling with life. India Arie wrote
this song “There’s Hope” and she
talks about this man in her song. She
talks about how he sees things and how that changed her. “There’s hope, it doesn’t cost a thing to
smile, you don’t have to pay to laugh…keep shining your light, show the world
your smile.”
I believe in God and I
believe that there are 3 very important things in this life that can trump what
we believe to be our basic needs. Faith,
hope, and love.
When I was in high school
I was part of this program, A.W.A.N.A. During
my time in that program I was supposed to memorize versus from the Bible. Well, one year I was responsible for knowing
1 Corinthians 13…yes, the whole thing!
While the main reason was for purposes of exceling in a tournament, the
impact of one of those versus reached a far greater depth in my heart. 1 Corinthians 13:13 says, “And now faith,
hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
I have known a great many
people and have had experiences myself where planned events were organized to
benefit a specific population of people who had this need we were designated to
fill. When I ponder my own experiences
and the stories of others that I know surrounding these experiences I see that
the greatest impacts we had went far beyond fulfilling that need.
Of course we need oxygen
and water and food, and that is physiological, but…all these miraculous stories
we hear and bear witness to about folks who decided not to give up; it’s because they had faith in something that
they loved and so they had hope for the future; same way with folks who are
“terminally” ill.
Think about the scene in Peter Pan when he proclaims his
belief in fairies (“I do believe in fairies, I do, I do” then Tink comes back
to life).
I think that sometimes
our bodies do fail, but I believe there is something bigger. I think about my own experiences. How when I was little doctors did not expect
me to live. They told my parents that
there would be a 5% chance of me surviving my the cancer I had. I was 18 months old. Obviously I am still alive AND kicking major
ass.
Sometimes things just
don’t make sense, but someone believed, loved, hoped, faithed-in something far greater.
And look, that something greater came to pass. Will you choose to believe despite the
circumstances? I dare you!
