Brené Brown, an expert on shame and vulnerability, explains that the difference between people who have love and acceptance and those who do not have love and acceptance is that the former believe they deserve love and acceptance.
This is amazing.
See if you can figure out the difference between Person A and Person B.
– Person A enters a party in which they don’t know anyone and they feel comfortable.
– Person B enters a party in which they don’t know anyone and they feel uncomfortable.
What is the difference?
{answer: Person A was expecting to feel love and acceptance.}
I remember the jaw-dropping feeling I had when I realized that the difference is in the mind.
Brene Brown writes:
People who have love and acceptance believe they deserve love and acceptance.
Do you feel that you deserve love and acceptance? Do you feel that you belong in the universe or that you don’t so much?
The word believe has its roots in the word lieb which means love? The original meaning of the phrase, “Do you believe in God” had nothing to do with credence, thinking, or faith. The phrase “I believe in God” meant “I feel beloved by God.”
## I want to help
I’d like to help. If I can. If you’d let me. If you’ll believe me.
I’d like to remind you that you do belong. That you deserve love and acceptance.
Rumi wrote:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
This is why those who truly “walk with God” seem impervious to the world around them. Because they know that they are loved.
## A memory
I remember being 30 years old and stopping near a busy street corner to listen to a street preacher.
Perhaps I stopped because I had recently left my mainstream job as a rabbi in organized Judaism, and I was curious if this man’s job was my next career move.
I stood there, like the type of sap I imagine people who stand to listen to street preachers do. On the ground, there was a box with some coins and a few bills and the words, “Dan, the God man.”
I wondered if there ought or ought not be a hyphen between God and man and what difference that would make.
And then I heard the words that I knew were the ones that I needed to hear: *You can tell the people who God has blessed for they have a smile on their face.*
## You again
You, you reading this, this is you. You are blessed. You are loved.
Allow yourself to smile and share this message of love,
Amen.
