Loving one another begins with a belief in goodness

​I don't spend a lot of time trying to raise good kids. I spend a lot more time trying to help my kids see the good that is already in them.

I believe we are all born with goodness in us; life can cause us to lose sight of that. In ourselves and in each other.

Gregory Boyle says, "You teach children that they are valuable by valuing them. Not by insisting that they prove their value to you. There are lot of things and toxins and blindness that keep us from acknowledging this and seeing it AS true, but nonetheless, it is immutably certain.

More and more these days when I see someone behaving in an 'evil' way, I find myself wondering what goodness that evil is hiding. What goodness it's hiding from them and from me.

For a large part of my life I think I lived expecting goodness. Now I know goodness often involves more of a search.

I supposed I learned that first by realizing I was spending a lot of time beating myself up because I couldn't be as good as I expected myself to be. You do that enough and you start seeing yourself as a bad person. You abandon the search to find the goodness within yourself.

Which makes it a lot easier to start abandoning the search to find goodness in others...

Unlovable people. Are they unlovable because they aren't good people? Or are they unlovable because they've lost sight of their goodness - and we've lost interest in helping them find it?

There are two pathways to love, I suppose. One is to love all who are obviously good. The other is to be so committed to love that we are on a constant search for the good that isn't always so obvious.

You know, when I was a kid they used to put little prizes in the bottom of the cereal box. I don't think they do that anymore 🤷‍♂️. Those prizes weren't always in cereal I liked eating, but I ate it anyways. Because I just KNEW there was something good waiting for me at the bottom of that box.

You'll go through a lot of stuff you don't like going through when you're certain there's something good at the bottom of it. If you don't believe that, you won't go through it.

In fact, you might even just throw it away.

The journey to getting better at loving everyone isn't about getting better at loving, it's about getting better at finding goodness. And before we can ever get good at that, we have to believe in it.

"There are lot of things and toxins and blindness that keep us from acknowledging this and seeing it AS true, but nonetheless, it is immutably certain....."