The Power of Love

“For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.”

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There was once a sad and solitary man named Mr. Hatch.  He lived alone, had no friends, and led a lonely, routine existence–until one Valentine’s Day he received a gift.  It wasn’t so much the giant box of candy that changed his life as it was the anonymous note enclosed:  “Somebody loves you!”

The revelation that somebody loves him breaks open Mr. Hatch’s heart so that the love trapped inside him overflows to all the people he sees each day.   He quickly becomes a happy friend to everyone until the day when he discovers that the anonymous note was misdirected.  In a moment that brings everyone to tears when I read this story aloud he says to himself, “Nobody loved me after all.”  And he goes back to his sad and lonely ways.

I won’t spoil the inevitably happy ending for you (which I also cannot read without crying).  Needless to say Mr. Hatch discovers that there are many somebodies who love him.

The very notion of love is enough to work a miracle in Mr. Hatch’s heart.  Love is amazing that way.   A smile, a touch, a kind word or deed–these small acts hold great power.

Money, time, attention–these are finite.  The demands on them are constant and draining.  We can and do run out of them.  Sometimes we have to say no.  Sometimes we have nothing left to give.

But love is powerful and infinite because of its source.

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. . . . if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. . . . We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen”  (I John 4: 7-8, 11-12, 19-20).

I wonder what would happen if all of us tried a little harder to love one another today?