I’m sitting here, still dreaming. Sunday morning, I suggested something that I often suggest: Love could/would change everything about the world we live in, on every level. So I’m dreaming about that.

I’m thinking about marriages and friendships, churches and schools. This pyramid scheme of love, where we love someone (or 2), then they love someone (or 2), allowed to naturally multiply using the agape definition, would leave modern culture virtually unrecognizable.

Without dishonoring posts & comments on our social media sites, it would just be an open space for family pictures, cat videos, and memes. Entire industries would vanish. Imagine a life free of envy, free of wanting anyone’s donkey. How different would our lives be if we were simply grateful for our own donkey’s? If kindness were the currency in grocery stores and classrooms, we would not be so afraid, hiding behind masks to keep from being today’s targets.

There was a story of a group of people keeping reminders of grudges and vendettas – what would we be able to do with the intellectual/emotional bandwidth we currently devote to bitter resentment? What about if we always protected, always persevered?

It’s a really good dream, but I think maybe my biggest problem is that it doesn’t feel so impossibly far away. It’s more like a parallel timeline that would easily merge with a few small adjustments from each of us. Like if I didn’t say those things about those people, that’s it. I don’t drag them through the mud, and I don’t feel horrible for opening my mouth. Then that negative energy never sees the light of day, is never expressed. What has been done in our impatient frustrated rage disintegrates, as we breathe and pray instead.

Sounds simple when I say it, right? It’s probably not. But it helps me “always persevere.”

I’ve already tried the other path, where I’m sarcastic, cutting, self-loathing. Where I assume the worst of you and me. Where I tear down before I am torn down. Where I am desperate and hopeless, endlessly searching for more evidence that it’s all broken beyond repair. Where it is what it is, and we are what we are.

And after that, all I felt was miserable. But loving you (and me and my neighbors and the cashier and the tv stars & politicians) and thinking about the pure, true, and beautiful makes every moment brighter. We get to choose the stories we live, and the glasses we wear through which we see our surroundings. We can choose something new and fresh. As it says in the book of Deuteronomy, it’s all set before us, we can Choose Life.