Opening Our Hearts to God

Interfaith Celebration Gathering

Do you have trouble opening your heart fully to others? Do you hold back a part of yourself in relationships because you have been hurt before? Most of us do some form of this self-protection. We do not want to be hurt as devastatingly as we may have been hurt before so we share only as much of ourselves as we have to share in order to keep a relationship going. We do this with our family, our friends and our pets.

But in order for us to live fully, we have to learn to love fully, to open our hearts wide and share the love that is inside us. We have to learn that God is always with us when others may fail us. We have to trust that we will be okay even if our love is not returned.

For us to experience the healing quality of complete love, we must be able to give complete love to anyone we choose to invite into our circle of friends. We must love them fully and not push them away or hold them at arm’s length. We must let them know exactly who we are and trust that it is okay to let others know us. We need to reach past whatever barriers we may have created in the past that tell us that if others truly knew us they would reject us. We have to learn to believe that we are God’s special creations, and as such are worthy of love, kindness, and compassion.

Many of us instinctively push people away when we are ill or sad or hurting, or in times of stress, but this is the time when we need the love of others the most. Most of us do this because we have reached out to others in troubled times and been hurt by their inability to show us love in our time of need. Thus whenever trouble comes our way we deny ourselves the very thing we need most – love.

Many of us are also hesitant to open our hearts fully to others because we have done so asked for help in the past and been rejected. When we learn to open our hearts to others, we will find that some people are just not capable of doing the same. Some people are especially incapable of meeting our needs for love when we are troubled. We need to bless those people, love them and release them to be exactly who they are and turn to others who can love us through our troubled times.

We need to learn that it is okay open our hearts fully to others and to ask for love, compassion, and concern when we are hurting. When we open our hearts fully to others we also open our hearts fully to God.

May the God of love add a blessing to these humble words.

AMEN