“Love is Nature’s second sun…”
–George Chapman
Love is as essential to our lives as sunlight is to the growth of plants. When a sun-loving plant is planted in the shade, its growth will be stunted if it lives at all. No matter how much water and fertilizer the plant is given, it cannot flourish without abundant sunlight. Likewise, love is as important to the proper growth and development of a child as food and shelter. We crave love from the moment we are born, and our need for love continues until the day we die.
We all have the capacity to give as well as to receive love, but some of us give more freely of our love than others. Some people spread love wherever they go and enrich the lives of all those with whom they come into contact. Others tend to be far more selfish, focusing much of their love on themselves.
It is essential that we love ourselves, because we cannot love others without loving ourselves. But we dare not focus all our love on ourselves. Love is not like money where the more we spend, the less we have. On the contrary, the more love we give, the more we have. But some people are as stingy with their love as they are with their material possessions. They focus all their love inwardly and expect others to lavish love upon them. But they are unwilling or unable to share their love. Others, who devote their lives to loving others discover that by so doing they bring love and happiness into their own lives.
Why are some people so loving while others are so self-centered? Only God knows the answer to this question, but we can all speculate as to why there is such a difference in people’s capacity to give of their love. Some attribute selfishness in individuals to a failure to receive sufficient love when they were children. But some of the most loving individuals in this world were themselves starved for love during their childhood. Perhaps a better explanation is that the capacity to love is a habit that we develop early in life and continue to cultivate throughout our lives. Almost all two-year-old children are selfish. They don’t know any better because they believe the world revolves around them. But as children mature, they become more and more conscious of the existence and needs of others in their lives. As this consciousness of others develops, children must decide whether to share with others. Perhaps it is these decision patterns, which begin early in life, along with additional decisions we make as we grow older, that makes some of us more loving than others.
Think about it.
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Copyright 2025
Allen W. Smith
