What is true love?

It’s sometimes quite hard to figure out what true love and a real spiritual relationship are about..

Today I spent the day with a girlfriend - happily married, not religious, surely not polygamous, and blissfully unaware of my chosen way of life. She has a great marriage, as far as I can judge. Her husband is responsible, good-hearted and loves the fact that he is a father. Basically to me they seem the perfect family.

I think any woman would like to spend her life in that way. With a loving and nurturing family, in which the husband/father plays an important role. However I see that the way God prescribes us to live is quite different. A father/husband is more of a leader of the household. He has to allocate time between different families, so as a wife or mother you are often left relying on yourself or on the other wives.

At the same time it’s clear to me that in this solitude you learn to rely on God more, which just deepens your relationship with Him. Or at least it’s supposed to work like that. Often the material life just takes over and it’s hard to keep in mind what we are getting in return from our Lord and how precious that is. Then what we are missing right now, is the only thing that matters.

God loves the broken-hearted

In hard times I always wonder why this suffering is needed. Not to over-dramatize, since so many people deal with real pain, the pain of losing beloved ones, of living in poverty, of opression and so on that one feels shy to claim that one's own life is tough.. but it sometimes does feel very much so. And when it does, I start to ask myself the ancient question 'why'?

A small insight occured to me today. And that is that every growth is painful. I think every woman while giving birth is inclined to think why the suffering is needed, but once the baby is born, the pain which she suffered becomes irrelevant. I think that most people who have expereinced personal growth and achieved wisdoms have done so due to suffering they had to deal with during their life. So I guess the one does not come without the other, and one should be happy with it...

A person once told me "God loves the broken-hearted". Just now I start to realize what it means.