According to society, love is supposed to be pink hearts and roses.
And according to society, love and lust are interchangeable words.
And then society tells us that if we stop having pleasure in a relationship or if we get bored with it, or things get too hard, that’s okay, because we can just get a divorce and/or move on to someone else.
The truth is that these so called 'truths' that society gives us are false. Love is not meant simply to bring us pleasure. In fact, true love will do just the opposite.
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| Society lies. Society tells us this is a cell clump of nothingness. |
As Mother Teresa once said, "it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt." True love hurts. It requires sacrifice. It causes us pain, whether that be physically or emotionally. But if someone sacrifices for you, doesn't that show just how much they love you?
It wasn't easy for Jesus to love us. Through the scourging, through the heavy cross, through the nails in his hands, He still loved us. If you don't think it was hard for him love us, watch The Passion, or read up on the damage carrying a cross and being hung up on it can do to one's body. And if you don't think he really loved us, look at the cross. It wasn't nails that held Him there. It was love. It hurt him to love us, physically, mentally and emotionally.
Mother Teresa once said that, "This is the meaning of true love, to give until it hurts."
We are called to love our neighbors, and this means more than just baking a cake for the new family next door (by the way, does anyone even do that anymore?). We are called to share the love of Christ with everyone we encounter and we are called to sacrifice for our neighbors.
One Saint Gianna Molla (1922-1962) is a great model of true sacrificial love.
Gianna was born in Italy, the tenth of thirteen children (however, only nine of the thirteen made it to adulthood, including Gianna). As a young woman, Gianna had hopes of one day joining her priest brother in his missionary work in Brazil. She got her medical diploma in 1949 and wanted to use it to help the poor people. She was chronically ill and so she could not do this near to the extent she wanted, but she did practice pediatrics in Italy.
Gianna met her husband in 1954, and by 1959, they had three children. She had two more children, which she lost before birth.
In 1961 she became pregnant with her sixth child. In her second month of pregnancy, Gianna developed a fibrome on her uterus.
The doctors gave her only three options:
1. She could have an abortion, which would save her life and allow her to have more children
2. She could have a hysterectomy, which would save her life, but it would kill her unborn child and she wouldn’t be able to children in the future
3. Or, she could have an operation to remove only her fibroma, which would be potentially fatal for her, but would significantly increase the chances of her unborn child's survival.
Although the doctors were most insistent on option #1, because they saw it as having the best results, Gianna was not going to let her child die if there was something she could do about it. So, she chose to have the operation to remove her fibroma. The fibroma was removed, but Gianna still had problems. It was becoming evident that Gianna would not be able to survive the birth of her child and she told her family that, “This time it will be a difficult delivery, and they may have to save one or the other – I want them to save my baby."
On April 21, 1962 (Good Friday that year), Gianna gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Gianna Emanuela. Gianna (the mother) died a week later. She was beatified a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1994.
Saint Gianna is a modern example of true love. True love hurts. True love requires sacrifice. Saint Gianna went through extreme amounts of pain, and what's even more, she gave up her life for that of her unborn child. If you want to know more about Saint Gianna, click here.
We wonder what is wrong with the world today, and often we blame everything bad that happens on God. Why would an all-loving, all-knowing God allow such evil in the world? It seems like the peace that everyone says they want for the world is unachievable.
There are certain key things that break peace. You see, as long as we are all more concerned about ourselves, our happiness, our well-being over that of our family, our friends, or even strangers, the peace we speak of is unachievable.
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| World peace starts in the womb. |
Many of us believe that abortion is wrong… in most cases. What about cases of incest and rape? What about cases where the health of the mother is at stake (much like Saint Gianna's story)? First of all, abortions due to incest and rape make up less than 1% of all abortions. And abortions due to the life/health of the mother or child makes up less than 2%. 98% of abortions are a result of personal choice (the child is unwanted or inconvenient).*
Second of all, it is not right to punish the child because of the sin of another. Someone once explained the situation to me as, "An act of violence created life, don't end that life with an act of violence." And adoption is always an option. And, in this day and age, with so much technology and medicine, it would be really rare for an abortion to be the only option in saving a mother's life.
Mother Teresa was a woman of great faith. She combined social justice with Church teaching, and wasn't afraid to share her beliefs with the world. Imagine the reaction in the White House in 1994 at the National Prayer Breakfast, when the small nun, in her quiet voice, proclaimed a bold truth, “...But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”
World peace starts in the womb. And really, what makes a child inside the womb so different from a child outside the womb? In the womb, the baby has brain waves, a heartbeat, we've even seen unborn babies react to music and smile!
Once we value and protect the precious life in the womb, once we are willing to love until it hurts, once we are ready to sacrifice for true love, then we will become a light of peace in the darkness of the world.
For an even more modern story (it actually happened last month!) of a mother's sacrificial love for her child, check this out.
*Abortion statistics: http://www.voiceofrevolution.
Note: Pictures above are from Live Action
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