Our heartbeat fights for us to exist

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Our heart must beat every moment, and each heartbeat fights for our existence and will strive to keep us alive.

This is how our heart is. It also strives to love and be loved. Love is God’s principle for existing. Human nature is programmed to love. Recently, I’ve had love on the brain. Not according to the lyrics in the song, but being with people who have shown me how to love. There are different kinds of love, but pure love comes from above.

My friend came to the Greek class distraught. She loves her bird, Merlin, aka Pooty. Merlin pulled out his tail feathers, had a rambunctious night in his cage and wouldn’t quit cawing. His tail feathers ended up on the bottom of the cage. Those feathers helped him balance on his perch; now he can’t sit up. She’s had to make a special place in his cage and prop him up. She loves her 30-year-old Pooty whose heartbeat has fought to live. Twenty years is the usual life expectancy for this kind of bird, but he has given her another 10 years for her pure enjoyment and, yes, trouble.

As she shared her concern for Pooty, I couldn’t walk down that road with her, so I reminded her of the reality of having a bird like Pooty.

“I know you love that bird, but he is a problem. He has tied you down. Your friends won’t take care of him because he caws all night. So you have to take the bird on vacation with you. The bird rules you. You jump through hoops for Pooty. Not only that, I think your bird is neurotic; look at his unstable patterns.”

I didn’t comfort her in her distress. In the night hours, I couldn’t comfort myself either until I apologized. I didn’t hear her in her pain. I called, “I’m sorry for talking about your bird that way. I know you love Merlin.”

She said, “It’s OK. I love you anyway.”

I told her, “Some people just know how to love. I could take a lesson from you. I don’t get it and why people love their animals so much. It’s like our family. They each have their own dog to love. Can’t they just have one family dog, instead of four, that they could all share? Apparently not.”

I continued to prop up my unloving excuse with my seared tail feathers. “God knows how to get one’s attention. I’ve been thinking about this realm of love. A grandson out of state, who loved and lost this year, has gone down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel. He’s been so lonely he could die. When a 23-year-old son calls his mother every night just to talk, you know he’s lonely.”

When this boy fell in love, he fell hard. How did this “love” go so wrong? Who was right and who was wrong? I have no idea. They write breakup songs just for these hard times. Now he is singing the “The Breakup Song”: “Sick and tired of being sick and tired … Fear, you don’t own me. There ain’t no room in this story. And I ain’t got time for you telling me what I’m not …”

Francesca Battistelli sings it. Wow, her words tell me she hasn’t found the right kind of love yet.

I told my Sweet Al I was going to write about this thing called love. It is hard to understand. Like faith, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a spiritual realm we enter into and can’t help ourselves when we fall. God is love and he desires that we love Him. Thereby, we will know how to love and be loved. That’s what His Word says.

My Sweet Al asked me, “So, why do you love me?”

I said, “I don’t know. I love how you love faithfully and completely. You have a beautiful heart. We thought we were in love before we knew what true love was all about. We fought for it to exist, just like our heartbeat fights for us to live. Miraculously, our love is still beating for each other.”

Only by God’s grace and His love, Al and I are still talking today. There were those years I wondered what love had to do with it. But apparently it had and has a lot to do with life.

I told Al, “Remember in high school how that cute boy was dating that really ugly girl. He was so in love with her and we all wondered why. Any girl would have given her right arm to date him, but he chose her.”

Al said, “I remember that guy. His girlfriend was so ugly, he had to sneak up on her. He dated her all the way through high school. She rode beside him in his hopped up 1955 Pontiac and they are still married today.”

It was the car that made Al remember. It was how cute the boy was that made me remember.

A teenage boy entered into love with his heart. Surely not what he was seeing, he was blinded by love. Love sees with the heart. It’s a God thing. Today a woman, she is a wife and mother and is beautiful. All because of the love in that boy’s eyes, she learned to be loved and knows how to love.

This is my advice for my grandson. The next time you fall in love, love God’s way and love enough to fight for it. Respect and love her enough to wait for her. You’re still taking that trip down Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel. My friend says to tell you, “Next time, until he finds the right girl, get a bird. It will caw all night and keep him company and he won’t be calling home and won’t have a need to talk to his mother.”

Final brushstroke: Like our heartbeat, it fights to keep beating and strives for us to live, even like Pooty, the bird. True love fights to remain and it fights to be loved. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. Love will never fail.

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