Love is not a feeling, it’s a practice
This weekend someone created a fake email address that looked almost exactly like mine, scraped contact information from the web, and sent messages to people in my community asking them to buy gift cards for me.
Some of you may know this scam. It starts innocently enough — “Got a minute? Can you help me?” — and turns into a request that exploits the trust people have built with someone they care about.
When I found out, I was a little angry, honestly. But underneath that, I felt something else…
I felt sad for them.
I found myself wondering: what kind of life is a person living when exploiting the love people have for each other seems like the answer to their problems? What has the world taught them about whether love is real, or safe, or available to them?
I went to bed thinking about it. And somewhere in the night, I woke up with these words on my heart:
All people need is to love and be loved.
Even that person. Especially that person.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Here’s what I want to explore with you — because I think it matters right now, in the world we’re actually living in:
What if love isn’t something we ration out to the people we decide have earned it? What if it isn’t a reward for good behavior or a feeling that shows up when conditions are right?
What if love is simply the water we all swim in — available to everyone, withheld from no one — and our practice is learning to live from it consciously and artfully, even when it’s hard?
And what if we could learn — really learn — that taking care of ourselves and continuing to love are not opposites? That it’s not either/or, but both/and?
As I sit with this, I have two stories that I think illustrate what this actually looks like in real life.
Choosing to Respond to Hate with Love
The first comes from Valarie Kaur’s beautiful book See No Stranger. In it she writes: “You are a part of me I do not yet know.”
I’ve been carrying that sentence around for weeks. Because it reframes everything — not just how we see strangers, but how we see the people who hurt us.
Rana lost both of his brothers to senseless violence. His brother Balbir was planting flowers outside his business when he was shot five times in the back, just days after the September 11th attacks, by a man who directed his rage at people he called “towel heads.” It was as senseless and tragic as violence gets.
And yet Rana insisted on responding to hate with love.
A few years after the murder, on his way to the annual memorial for his brother, Rana spotted the killer’s wife and daughter. He recognized them. And he invited them to dinner.
Some time later, he called the murderer in prison to forgive him.
Let that land for a moment.
Rana didn’t pretend his brother wasn’t murdered. He didn’t make excuses for what the killer did. He felt every ounce of his grief — and he chose love anyway. He protected his heart and kept it open at the same time.
For Rana, love was never just a feeling. It was a practice. A daily, costly, eyes-open commitment to refuse the lie that hatred gets the final word.
A Tiny Act of Kindness That Changed Everything
My second story is simpler — and maybe that’s exactly the point.
It comes from NPR’s My Unsung Hero podcast. A man named Ken Wilcox tells of a time when he was working for what he describes as a “tyrant,” while also grieving the loss of many friends to AIDS. Walking down a street in Washington D.C. on a cold January day, feeling hopeless and full of despair, a woman walking toward him deliberately caught his eyes….
and smiled.
She said nothing. She just smiled, and walked on. She had no idea who he was or what he was carrying that day.
But that one smile was enough to keep him going. He quit his job shortly after. And eventually became a minister — a vocation he loves deeply.
His words: “I have to marvel at the idea that all of that has come about because this one wonderful woman on a street in Washington D.C. on a cold January day decided to smile at me. She is my unsung hero.”
I’ll admit — when I first found this story the name Ken Wilcox seemed familiar. I just thought it was a beautiful illustration of ordinary love. And then I looked him up.
And of course, Dr. Ken Wilcox is the Senior Minister of a Center for Spiritual Living in St. Augustine, Florida – a colleague on a similar path.
That anonymous woman didn’t just keep a stranger going on a hard day. She set a minister’s life in motion. And she will never know.
Both/And
Here’s what strikes me about these two stories side by side.
Rana’s love came at a very dear price. He had to walk through unimaginable grief and choose, over and over again, not to let hatred win. The woman on the street in Washington gave away three seconds and a smile.
And both were transformative.
This is the genius of love as a daily practice — it doesn’t require heroism. It doesn’t require that you have it all together or that you feel particularly loving on any given day. It just requires the willingness to show up, consciously, as love in the moment you’re in.
And here’s the both/and that I keep coming back to: in the case of the scammer who tried to exploit our community’s trust — we set a boundary, we warned each other, we took care of ourselves. And we kept showing up for each other. And somewhere underneath the frustration, I found room to feel something like compassion for a person whose life has led them to this.
That is mature love. Not sentimental. Not naive. Not a doormat. But rooted in the understanding that we are all, somehow, part of each other. That…
“you are the part of me I do not yet know”.
The Invitation
We all have opportunities every single day. The person who annoys you. The situation where you feel over your head. The stranger who needs a smile. The person who has hurt you and doesn’t deserve your forgiveness — and yet.
Love is always the answer. Not because it’s easy or because the other person has earned it. But because it is the truest thing there is. The water we all swim in, whether we know it or not.
And when we are willing — to feel the feeling, walk through the circumstance, and love anyway — something shifts. We stop being victims of the world’s hardness and start being agents of its healing.
On the pathway of becoming, love is the way-show-er.
Where in your life is love asking you to practice it today — not as a feeling, but as a choice?
