Restoring Feelings of Love – January 07, 2001
To have loving associations with family and friends is the height of joy in this life. Likewise, to have these relationships severed can bring the greatest sorrow. When the wedge between you and someone you once felt close to widens, it may feel as if the relationship’s beyond repair. There’s a way to restore the feelings of love. Though it requires patient persistence, the formula’s quite simple.
The story’s told of a young girl who was visiting her uncle in the country. She came upon a tortoise and started to examine it, but the tortoise closed his shell like a vise. Her uncle saw her trying to pry the shell open with a stick. “No,” he said, “that’s not the way.” He took the creature inside and set him on the hearth. In a few minutes he began to get warm, stuck out his head and feet, and calmly crawled toward the girl. “People are like [tortoises],” her uncle said. “Never try to force a fellow into anything. Just warm him up with a little human kindness, and more than likely he’ll come your way.”1
A father and mother, who were grieving over their lost relationship with their rebellious teenage son, made the same discovery. They’d been trying to force their son into complying with their family values; the more they preached, the further away they pushed him. After much prayer and searching for a better way, they realized their mistake. As they began to listen to him without preaching, and to express their love without demands, an amazing thing happened. His temperament softened, his countenance changed, and he began to enjoy being around home. In a short time, he returned to the values he’d been taught as a child. The mother said, “Kindness and understanding gave us back our son.”
The words of a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi give additional guidance: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.”2 This may well be the key to building and restoring feelings of love in all our relationships.
Program #3725
1. Rilla Leggett, in Maxwell Drake, ed., The Christian Leader’s Golden Treasury (Indianapolis: Droke House, 1955), 293.
2. In John Bartlett, ed., Familiar Quotations, 16th ed. (Boston: Little Brown Co., 1992), 123.