A love that keeps shining

We build cement blocks to protect ourselves from each other, sound-proof cells where each can only access her own floor. We don’t know the names of our neighbors, nor greet another in the elevator but turn and silently face the door.

Yet even in our isolation, we belch our pain farther and higher, touching our neighbor

as much by the absence of a smile as by an impatient word. Both stab the same

tender, armoured spot. “You don’t matter.”

Perhaps our self-absorption comes from our own fears. Perhaps we need to look

beyond the cement and the smoke of our own carefully guarded pain to where

Love daily paints his call to come and be healed, to where He speaks the astounding truth. “You do matter.”


“Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the whole sky.”

– Hafiz, beloved 14th c Persian poet