Capacity to love

Love is the one thing that has made people change, kill, gain, or lose weight. For some it’s broken to pieces while others it’s healed those broken pieces. After each heartbreak, you wonder if you will have the capacity to love again after being bruised or broken. Sometimes we are scared that maybe we won’t love with the same intensity because it will lessen the chances of us getting hurt. I mean the less you love the less you get hurt.

This is the season of love when Hallmark works overtime to ensure you are entertained throughout with all the Christmas love movies. While others will be cuddling while watching this others will be eating popcorn and reminiscing a moment when they experienced such. Thinking through this got me thinking about our capacity to love as humans.

The thing is we experience love in different forms depending on who, when, and where we are at in life. The love a parent feels for a child varies from the love a husband feels for a wife or that between friends. While these connections do not necessarily signify the capacity to love I am genuinely amazed at how we humans love.

For today I will touch on a rather sensitive not so sensitive topic when it comes to love. What happens when you are a lover girl or boy that gets hurt over and over again? Do you stop loving, get into your hoe phase, or switch sides, does it change you and most of all does it ruin your capacity to love?

I will be ignorant if I say it doesn’t because it does. Even so, I am learning to realize that it doesn’t have to change the core of who you are mostly because you are the only constant in your life. I had my heart broken a while back and remember telling a friend how there was a switch that had gone off. To me, the switch simply meant that I would not allow myself to fall for anyone again to that capacity which meant holding back because then the risk of a huge heart break would reduce. It made sense and when love came knocking again I didn’t say no but I gave it conditions.

The only difference is this time the person delivering gave it unconditionally, a Jesus type of love if you ask me. That still wasn’t enough to convince me for reasons best known to me so I held back as usual. The thing however when we get broken one too many times we accept the love we think we deserve. So when the right kind of love comes we do anything to sabotage it because we believe our capacity to love is depleted. One person can’t have that much love left in them.

But the thing about unconditional love is it pours into you and refills that capacity and as I mentioned it doesn’t come from a human because only Jesus can enable one to love this fully. He is the embodiment of love and he refills our will and capacity to love. Yes, I just turned Bible on you. In other cases, He loves us, through people. From my experience, I have also learned that I have the capacity to love my present as much or even more like there was no heartbreak. 

Love is something that is within and our capacity to love is something that can’t be taken away from us.