The Stem System

When you live in a house, the art of cooking turns it into a home. Unfortunately, you begin to encounter hot pans and hot hands. Eventually you'll end up like a few of your dishes: burned.

Occasions like these cause me to be thankful I adopted an aloe plant. The amazing characterisitc about an aloe plant is that it's not your ordinary cactus, absorbing minor increments of water and displaying it's anti-blooming features of greenness. It's the fact that when you get scolded from a hot surface, ripping off a piece of this natural specimen appendage becomes soothing on your skin. Despite the missing segment, it fails to phase the plant as it continues to grow, still giving more goods in comparison to the water it absorbs.

The human condition is a lot like an aloe plant. There is a necessary component to the nature of our well being and wholeness that involves the act of giving. Once I begin to think about it, giving so essential to life and wholeness. All real relationships require the act of giving, mainly love.

Because love in it's purest expression is not something that is received, but something that is given.

For example, when I become emotional consumer of love, I've become unable to experience the very thing we long for: love. When I want to consume the beauty and love that is extended to me, I cannot accept it. Yet, in a paradoxical manner, when I give the very thing I do not have, I gain it.

The person who gives away the most of himself will have the greatest experience of love. The aloe plant that does not bear branches dies, but the one that grows from it's gift thrives.

Wholeness comes as a sacrifice and sacrifice as love.

Jesus finds himself being asked what the greatest commandment is, among a vast history of countless commandments. He explains that the first is loving God and loving yourself as your neighbor. This commandment comes two fold, not three. Instead of loving God, loving myself, and loving my neighbor, but by simply loving God and loving my neighbor, I take that paradoxical road and being to love myself.

Nothing is more important to God than our relationships, because when I love others, it reflects the heart of the Creator. Love's appearance is so vast to give. It becomes a limitless resource.

A hand in the kitchen.

An ear to listen.

A ride to the airport.

A cup of coffee.

A heart in a moment of crisis.

The more I give away this love, the more I become whole, like an aloe plant. We are all designed to be an intense aloe plant, a love machine. It doesn't focus on absorbing, it focuses on giving. And by giving, it heals wounds with love.