you will accept the beautiful gifts

-Even though someone else is dying. Even though somewhere, there is a small child hurting that you can't help, that you don't even know about. Even though in your very own family, someone is probably hurting at this very moment. Even though today, as you carried new life and rejoiced in your children, a family in your community was laying to eternal rest their 17 year old son, Tyler. Even though some day, maybe tomorrow, you might be facing the worse pain of your life: Because some day, maybe tomorrow, you might face the worse pain of your life- because of this, it is the height of egoism and waste to feel guilty for being blessed. To feel the tremble of the Universe's great jaws as you are embraced and carried along what would have been a long, lonely and hard walk: because you have walked there, and because you will again, and because you can only offer those you love what you can carry inside of you: you will accept your joy without shame, without guilt, without fear.

Or: you will feel the fear, and you will ignore it. You will give it a sideways glance of pity and perhaps a nod of recognition, and you will walk into your gifts with an open heart. You will accept the beautiful gifts, because you deserve beautiful things to happen even though you are not perfect, and even though you have caused pain to other people in your life, and even though you probably will again. You will embrace the joy around you because you wish your children to embrace the joy around them. You will accept love and care and abundance because these things will strengthen your blood when your blood runs thin, when Aslan is revealed as the King and your feet are in thin air and you realize it is your time to mourn: because then, only if you have this rich once-loved blood, will you be able to go where you are being carried without taking everyone you love with you.

You will be loved deeply because you wish to love deeply. You recognize that suffering is ongoing in this world, and accept that refusing your deepest, most profound joys to sink as far as they can into your heart is not protecting anyone, anywhere from their pain.

You cannot hoard your happiness in a cellar, untouched, so as to offer it to those who are in despair. It doesn't work like that.

How it works is so simple and deconstructed that you feel you have missed the point- but you haven't: you take what you are given, you are grateful for it, you embrace it, and then when someone is in front of you that you can help or heal in any small or large way, you do so. That is your moral obligation, your spiritual foundation, and the reason to exist with other human beings. If you do not take what you are offered by the Universe, you will not be able to give when the hungry and despairing heart is lain into your hand like the sparrow God keeps his eye on. If you want to love more, do not refuse to be loved.

It is this: You cannot stop loss by refusing love. You can only make loss mean something by ever having been loved and by loving.

This is the meaning behind the horror: we give meaning with our lives. We create meaning with our action. Create the world you want your children to believe in. Face love and accept it. You cannot change the end of the story. You can change the story, though.

Get to it.