Soulshine

“If I knew how good it felt,  I would have done it a long time ago. It really felt amazing ...  It's about self-esteem and dignity at the end of the day.” Ricky Martin Pop singer Ricky Martin came out of the closet as a gay man a year or two ago. He chose to stop pretending he was someone he wasn’t. It didn’t make him any less of a man, or any less of a talented human being. It may or may not have affected his personal relationships and his career. But none of that is near as important as how it affected him in his own relationship with himself. And on a personal level he says “It really felt amazing.” He got his own self-respect back and that’s irreplaceable because no amount of success could make him happy if he wasn’t happy with himself. It makes no difference what we have been hiding from others. Maybe we’ve been keeping a secret about our sexual orientation, or our addictive habits, or a past mistake, or a personal disability. But no matter what it i...

“Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Gospel of John How has God loved us? Passionately. Greatly. Unconditionally. Powerfully. Equally. God’s love for everyone is equally as great, as unconditional and as powerful. God has no favorites. No one is “more” to God or “less” to God than anyone else. We are all equal in the eyes of God and we are all equally loved by God. And so our calling is to love each other equally, just as God loves us. This means we need to come to terms with our fears concerning our own lovability. We must believe God loves us without fail and we must learn to love ourselves in the same way. We must then love others as we are loved by God and ourselves. To do so we have to come to term with a further set of fears: Fears about those who are different from us and fears of those who we simply don’t understand. In order to set aside our fears about those who are different from us, we need to lesson the grip of ignorance...