When you are in a situation where you are at your wit’s end, that is when you must dig deeper for the love in your heart. When you don’t have a mite of love left, close your eyes a minute, and you will find a seed of love sprouting. The thing is: you can find it. The odds are that no one else will find it for you. They are too busy not finding their own.

You may well not find love in circumstances, but love is your call. No matter what everyone else chooses, it is for you to choose love. Even if you are the only one, love is the choice you have to make. It is the only choice to make. It is your choice to make because you have the awareness to do so. Life will present many occasions for you to dig deep into the pockets of love.

If you want a world where love is given its due, then you must give it. No more of this mistaken idea of a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. It has a nice rhythm to it, but it is an endless game, and games must come to an end, and you, beloved, you are the one to end it. You are a leader now.

You are no longer a hockey stick that bats the puck around.

No longer are you the one affronted, insulted, hurt, aggravated, dismayed. Or, if you are, you step out of that mode. You go a step higher, and you remember that life is more than who said what, and who did what, and they can’t do that.

Obviously they can. They have. That is their story, not yours. You have a different story to tell. You are starting a new chapter. You are beginning right now. No longer do you attain to be a winner of arguments. Nor are you an appeaser. You are one who leaves the boxing ring. No longer do you spar. Now you practice love.

But if it is too hard for you to find love at a particular moment, then at least leave retorts aside. At least end the diatribe. Let go of it in your mind as well. Life has to be more than tit for tat. You are more than someone who trades one answer for another.

You can say in your mind: “Enough of this. I have had enough squabbling. If someone wants to squabble, let them, but I am done. Let them go on and on with their nonsense, but I’m out of it. Let them have the last word. Let them have that brief satisfaction. That moment of victory is no longer sweet to me.

“I yearn for victory over myself. I yearn to be done with disputes, no matter how righteous. I am done with self-righteousness now. I don’t care who’s right. I care that I’m out of the nonsense, and I never want to go there again.

“My disputes may be minor, just little infringements of my ego, but now I know that when I am in my littleness, it gets multiplied. What are great wars but a magnification of my littleness? Other hearts have taken over my battle-cry and made it their own. They wear uniforms and bear arms that I don’t have, but they have taken over my role. The field may be far greater, but the battle is the same. Ego is warring with ego.

“I have laid my ego aside. I don’t want it, and I’m not going to feed someone else’s. I have other fields to plow. This does not mean I am on the sidelines of life. It means I am on the forefront of love. Even if I can only muster a little love, that is what I will give. May my fraction of love rally a whole army of love and so vanquish wars before they start.

“This is my prayer, oh, Lord, and I know it is Yours as well.”