I carried this burden for a long time to try to be what they call the father, the man of the house. That's what they told me. My dad left when I was 2. I moved in with my grandmother and my granddad. And then my granddad died when I was just about to turn four. And where we lived at the time, they told us, they put. It was like a patriarchal system. So even though I was the four, I was still the oldest man, so they say. And so I lived with all this pressure until this guy came in my life, Chico. And he and my mom were in a relationship till I was about 12. And then they split up. And if you've ever felt this, like, love before and then feel that love go away, it's a hard thing, especially if it's happened once or twice or three times.
[00:24:04]
Except for Chico chose not to leave even though he and my mom split up. He said to me, when I fell in love with your mom, I fell in love with y'. When I chose your mom, I chose y'. And even though your mom and I aren't together anymore, you're gonna always be my son. And at first, I thought it was just a nice thing to say, except for he stayed in my life for the next 40 years and loved me and showed me that the love that I fear losing, if I just hold myself open to receiving love, it will come from somewhere.
[00:25:17]
And so the invitation of our time together this morning is to trust love. Even when you can't trust the stories, you can't trust maybe sometimes people. But love will do what love does, and it will come back. And so we don't have to hold on so tightly, because love comes back around.
[00:26:13]
The words that we say matter, the thoughts that we hold matter, the consciousness that we exhibit, express, and embody, they all matter. And we are creating worlds with the ways that we show up with the ways that we love, the ways that we don't love, the questions that we ask, the throwaway statements that we think don't matter, they're all shaping the world.
[00:28:43]
But the cool thing about it is, as conscious beings, we can always reframe, we can always transform, we can always recreate. And so I invite us in this seemingly crazy world, in this seemingly crazy time, to be mindful of what we're creating, being mindful of the questions we ask, and mindful of what's guiding us.
[00:29:23]
If love sometimes invites me to places that I wouldn't have chosen on my own, I go. Because that's where love is going. And many times in our lives, I think all of us, at our core, I think that that's our story. I think that all of us want to love. I think that all of us come from love. All of us are constantly emerging from love. And all of us know on some level that we will return to love.
[00:33:29]
And at the same time, we carry this fear of getting hurt. We carry this fear of. Of not being seen, of not being valued, of not belonging. And so then we conditionalize ourselves in the ways that we express and the ways that we receive because we're trying to protect that one little piece of love that we might have felt, that one little piece that we had when we were a little kid. We're holding onto it so tight because we just don't want to get hurt again. Meanwhile, the world is waiting for all of us to open ourselves up to love and to go where love leads.
[00:33:56]
How many of you have caught yourself knowing the loving thing to do, but then just not being able to do it when the moment shows up? Anybody? Almost everybody. Why? I'm asking legitimately, why do you think you know already? We have this knowing. Why do we not do what we know? Conditioning. Fear. Yeah. I think we all know that we are also a lot more perfect than we have been enculturated into believing.
[00:34:33]
And one of the things that I caught myself doing was, for the first time in my life, questioning whether it was okay for me to love myself. I don't know why I kind of loved myself. And I didn't know I wasn't supposed to according to the rules, because all these things teach us to hate ourselves a lot of times, a lot of these institutions and things. And I actually looked in the mirror because I wanted to fit back in with them when they kicked me out. And I caught myself trying to destroy myself to fit in with them, to diminish who I experienced myself as.
[00:35:34]
And I found that so many of us are conditioned to not love ourselves that we police other people from being able to love fully. We teach each other to be fearful instead of modeling the love that brought us into the world and will carry us through everything.
[00:36:23]
The logos is not just a vocabulary word. It's the frequency that creates all things. It's the thing out of the vibratory just resonance of love that just brings all things into being. And when we align with that vibratory resonance of love, we become creators. When we hold that back, we become makers. And makers are less than creators.
[00:37:10]
But a creator can take the fundamental constituents of what is and create things that have never been. Does that make sense? So that means we can bring healing to where there has not been healing. We can bring love to where there seemingly has not been love. We can bring hope to things where there seems to not be any hope. But we only can do that if we ground ourselves in the word of love. That was the beginning.
[00:37:56]
Many of the things that we've learned to fear, someone taught us because they thought it was love. They tried to make love instead of creating from love. And they made love be protection from all these things. But I don't know if you all know, like the. From the course in Miracles, it says nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists. You ever heard of it? Right. So love is what's real, and it is perpetually guiding us towards greater and greater experiences of this love. But we have to first let go of the fear that was disguised as love.
[00:39:48]
Many of us come from experiences where people were like, well, they loved me, but. And then we make excuses for bad theology, bad behavior, poor treatment, all of these things because we want to hold on to the illusion that this person loved us. But. But love doesn't have like a. Well, it sounds weird to say love doesn't have a. But love is all inclusive. It is an and. And some person can love us to the best of their ability, and there is more love available to us, and we have to be able to allow that. We have to let go of the fear disguised as love and embrace the love that casts out all fear.
[00:40:34]
If we don't love ourselves, then we're going to project the things that we feel about ourselves onto God and onto people. And that is harmful. But it's also hopeful because if we love ourselves, we're going to then project that out into the world, and we're going to be guided and led by the love, not just from somewhere out there where conditions have to get perfect in order for us to be who we already are, but where the sender, the Christ within, the loving being that you already know that you came into the world as is guiding you, is leading you loveward.
[00:41:59]
There's a silent knowing within us that we sometimes failingly try to express in words, but we are it. And if we can sit in the center of that stillness. My wife actually wrote me a poem one time when we first got into a relationship where she said about sitting in the center of the stillness where there's nothing left to purge. So if we can get to ourselves, where we're in that center of that stillness, where there's nothing left to purge and allow ourselves to just know and to just be, even when we can't express it in words, we can radiate that out into the world.
[00:43:17]
Freedom. I've come to understand that freedom without love becomes kind of a dominating force, but love without freedom becomes co dependence. And so we have to figure out how to love freely, to set us all free from that, and to live in a way that sets all humans free.
[00:44:41]
Following love means walking toward the places where we withhold our love. Those places where we think that we're not going to be received is the places where we need to give. Does that make sense, inviting us into that? Because it's a challenge and it's going to be tough, and a lot of people don't choose it. But I think that y' all can.
[00:45:03]
Joy is the gift of love, and grief is the price of love. To be human is to Be capable of holding joy in one hand and grief in the other and being able to know that they are all emerging from love. But we can't do that. If we're afraid of getting hurt, we can't do that. We are going to get hurt. That's part of being here. But we also are going to heal. We're also going to resurrect in moment by moment by moment. And that is the gift that you have been given and the gift that the world's waiting for you to offer out.
[00:45:53]
Everywhere we're looking, all the problems that we see, all the struggles come from people wanting to be loved, wanting to belong, and wanting to be safe. And if they feel like any one of those things is threatened, they're not going to live from their highest vibration. They're not going to live from their highest ideal. And we can't wait for them to do that in order to love them. We just can't.
[00:47:27]
But what we can do is we can accept that we are eternally loved, that we eternally belong, and that nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists. So we're eternally safe. And if we can emerge from that awareness and emerge from that consciousness and project that into the world, then we are living the word, we are living love, and we are creating, consciously creating the world that we know is possible.
[00:47:47]
You all gather in communities like this because you know that this world is possible. And you come here to practice that world amongst each other at Unity Boulder. When you're here, you're practicing the world that we know is waiting to be born. But when you go out into the world and you radiate that then the world starts to mirror what you know is in your heart. And more of us need to do that.
[00:48:13]
So many of us, we're waiting for permission to love, permission to be and to reflect the Christ within in this world. And we can't do it without people who embody it, who live it, who know it. So my invitation to you and my hope for this world is that you all will live as fully as possible into the truth that you already know and give other people permission to do the same.
[00:50:05]
