To love unconditionally is easier said than done. We live in a world brimming with judgment, resentment, grudges, and blame. You’ve heard the expression, “forgive and forget.” It is far easier to forgive than to forget.
We know how tough it is to forgive someone when we’ve been seriously wronged. How do we program ourselves to love without condition?
There are many examples of unconditional love, for instance, the story of the Prodigal Son in the Bible. Or when your kids tell you that it’s OK after you apologize for taking out your work frustration on them by yelling at them to clean their room. In most marriages, we find ourselves at some point or another challenging our spouses, but it rarely becomes a question of whether you’re going to leave the relationship. That’s unconditional love.
I recently heard a sad story that demonstrated unconditional love. A younger woman married an older man who had two adult children. The children, who had been upset with their father since their parents’ divorce many years earlier, treated his new wife very badly.
Shortly after the new bride and the father’s wedding, the husband was in a terrible automobile accident. Confined to a wheelchair and unable to take care of himself, he was not able to give her the children that she desperately wanted. She stayed with him, though, and took care of him until the day he died many years later. Rarely during that time did the kids come visit or offer to help take care of their father.
After the husband’s death, the children threw their father’s wife out of the house where she had lived all those years taking care of her husband. With nowhere to go, she rented a small apartment across town. Not long afterward, her late husband’s son came knocking at her door. He had gotten into a trouble with drugs and the house was going to be foreclosed by the bank.
She could have ignored this son who had mistreated her from the very beginning but she didn’t. She got him into a rehab facility and fixed up his house — her husband’s house — for sale so that the son could pay off his debts and still afford a smaller home. She did this because her late husband had always fretted that his divorce from their mother had caused his children to head down their wayward paths.
The boy moved into the new home and stayed there — until he nearly died of an overdose two years later and his mother moved him into her home so she could take care of him. His sister took over the father’s house from her brother and the second wife never heard from them again.
That could have been a sorry ending to a long, drawn out saga. But as fate would have it, the doting second wife met another man and they married a few months after meeting. One year later, they started planning a family of their own.
When you love unconditionally, you become a person of strength, meaning you are not willing to fall into society’s trap of holding a grudge or creating conditions to help or care for others. Loving unconditionally releases us from the grasp of poison and it enables us to live a life of freedom and happiness.