Time is not your master. Love is. Love is the grace by which you rule your world. And you do rule it, beloveds. This may seem absurd to you, to you who may feel you are the underdog, yet it is very possible that you have ruled your world with the urgency of time. Very likely.

Caught up in time, urgency fuels you. You lead your life by the setting of a clock. Time does alarm you. It gets you all het up. Time is a galley master and tells you when to row and at what pace. Time runs out.

Love has an even temperament.

Love and time are miles apart. Love is not on a schedule. Love is a sampling of Infinity and its other facet, Eternity. Love doesn’t hurry nor does it slow down. Love is settling. Infatuation is exciting. Infatuation has a timer. Love does not.

Time keeps its eye on the future. Love is immersed in loving in this Infinite moment.

Love is sitting by a beautiful blue stream that splashes your face with its water, and you come alive with all the love of the Universe. You didn’t think that love was something personal just between you and another, did you?

Yes, consider love the water you swim in, cooling, refreshing, warmed by the Sun, cooled by the breeze, love like water so easy to move through. You sit by the banks of love, and your heart is happy. Unless you are happy, then what you like to call love, even great love, is nothing but a tempest in a teapot.

I am speaking of love, not as something you keep to you and order around, but of love as what you are, and so it flows naturally from you, asking nothing in return. Love does not ask for itself. Love’s happiness is in giving, not gathering. In what direction does your hand move, taking in or giving out?

Let’s face it, beloved. You are an amateur in love. Certainly you are not an expert. Perhaps in theory, you know something, yet theory isn’t the same as living. To love, really give love from your heart, relaxes you. Love is not tension-building. The attention on time and the occurrence of your heart feeling empty without a loved one is a fantasy play that you direct.

When you give milk to your baby, you don’t ask for a thank you. You give without the necessity of return. The act of giving is pleasure enough. You don’t look for more. You have an opportunity to live in love. You give the simplicity of love, not complications and add-on’s of love. Your heart is stirred, and yet it stays calm. Nothing is in peril. Certainly not your heart. You give from your heart, and your heart is filled with more love. This is mathematics at its finest. The more you give, the more you have. Those math problems you have in school about how you can give away so many apples and how many apples you wind up with miss the point. The point in giving is giving without counting. So there are no strings of expectation to attach to, to give as though you are in the middle of a math problem.

Giving is not a math problem. Giving is a filling up. The more love you give, the more you have. Write that down in your heart fifty times until you live it. The question in life is not: ”What return am I getting?” but rather: “How much am I giving, and giving freely, giving without any idea of return.”

The pleasure of giving is giving. There is no more to it than that.