“Just Because” LOVE

    As some of you all know, I’ve been through the wringer all my life. It’s been one trial after another. I’ve had an experience where I got a tiny sip of the pure overwhelming love that comes from GOD in heaven. I’ve tasted that joy that can’t be described in words. I’ve felt every cell in my body light up just in His Presence, the couple of times that it has happened to me. I want it, and I want it, now.

    All my life, I’ve been the little girl who nobody loved, or so I saw that in myself. I was the black sheep of the family, the one they always blamed. I was the controversial one, the troublemaker, they said. I grew up in a very secular home where Jesus was surely NOT present, so of all six of us, who did Jesus pick to be the first to experience his encompassing love? Why me, of course. My mother was rougher around the edges than I am, if you can believe that. She did some horrible things because she was not in control of all her faculties. She had a mean streak, and a tongue that could slice leather if she was mad at the leather. 

    She loved me because I was her daughter, and that’s it. There was nothing about me that she loved, and she made that evident. My father loved me because I was his daughter, and the only one of the six who maintained contact with him all my life. The others have been estranged for over forty years. So, his is a grateful love. My siblings love me, because my mother drilled it into us that friends come and go, but your family is for life. So, theirs is an obligatory love because my mother told them they had to love me. She told them a lot of other things, that were counterintuitive, but she stressed obligatory love for family.

    My children love me because I’m their mother and I take care of their needs. My husband only loved what I could do for him during our thirty-year marriage. Whenever I asked him why he loved me, he couldn’t come up with a good reason except, “Because you’re a good woman.” In thirty years, that was the only nice thing my husband ever said to or about me. Most of the time, he drilled it into my head all the reasons why people did NOT like me. There is a love that is so pure that it can only come from One Place. 

    There was one person however, who loved me just because. It was pure, it was wonderful, and it had no other reason then just because. That was my Nana. That love died when she did sixteen years ago. Hence, I’ve lived without that “just because love” all these years, and let me tell you, life isn’t worth living unless there is someone who loves you “just because.” Yet, in all that, I’ve loved everyone in my life just because. I never understood why, because many were so mean to me, but I could never stop loving them just because. GOD put that love in my heart, I take no credit.

    As a cancer survivor, I am always on the lookout for my “ticket Home,” as I call it. I can’t take life loving just because and not having any “just because” love back. Someone asked me if all I needed was "just because" love to fight cancer for a second time, and why just that: 

   My answer was unequivocally. “Yes, "JUST BECAUSE.”