Love Them Theory

Yesterday I decided to distract myself from the overthinking I’ve been trapped inside of for years that seem like a season in hell to pick up the guitars I’d bought at the Goodwill store and start painting. I’m not exactly an artist. Even my stick figures are hard to make out. But I have this one gift of taken broken things that other people would deem as trash and turning them into light fixtures. I’ve always been obsessed with lights. From my earliest memories sitting alone at night on a rooftop staring out at the sky in wonder I’ve had this deep connection with the stars. The luminaries are full of wonder, beauty and perhaps even magic – or so I believed.

I decided to pick up my phone and hit play on some reading material that I had in my vast library of audible books I’d started and never finished and as I scrolled through I remembered a passenger I met on a plane last week to New York who was struggling with anxiety mid-flight. She had worry written on her face and a book tightly in her grip that said, “Let Them.”

As I listened to the author Mel who has become quite famous in recent years after starting a podcast and reaping the benefits of an idea gone viral, I heard a previous version of myself speaking through her words. It was a peculiar experience – even her chosen stories aligned with memories I keep inside of times past where I once battled through Helicopter Mom Syndrome and the process of learning valuable lessons about letting go of control over other people. And as far as her life advice that she applied to the strength of human character to make decisions and charge forward in times where helplessness takes root, I could write a thousand books on the subject of an Overcomer who knows how to take charge of any situation and come out with the Victory.

I was the strongest woman I’ve ever known – tried and tested by life in the most horrid ways beginning literally at birth. Part of me felt the ego mind rising up inside with self-anger, asking, “Why didn’t you ever speak your wisdom? Why didn’t you write a book like this? The world obviously needed to know your methods you’ve learned through hard knocks. This woman is an icon because of her decision to write this theory that you once lived by.” I thought back to age three when my first dad left and age 17 when the second left and age 18 when my mother left and onward into a cycle that never seemed to change within my career, relationships and personal life up to the “death due us part” oath that I upheld after my ex-husband suffered a brain injury and I stepped in as caregiver – laying down my life for 3 years just to be betrayed and left yet again by love’s sting. I am the living, walking example in every way and every example of what it looks like to walk inside of the “Let Them Theory.” And where the author picked up the next step and said, “Let Me,” I saw the warrior inside of my own being that rose above every single let down and setback life has thrown at me. I literally managed to turn every loss into gain, every heartbreak into higher love and every rejection into a stepping stone that took me higher levels of success and fullfillnent.

Life has taught me that the dark times are the greatest blessings of all because they become the doorways to greater purpose, greater success, greater love and a more joyful season beyond anything that lies in the past. Until I found out how powerless I truly am.

As I attached to lights to the little guitar frames I could feel the uneasiness circulating inside of my body – every cell screaming out in a strange wave of speech that needed to find words. I grabbed a notepad and a pen and I wrote Mel’s theory “Let them,” on the page. Then I scribbled through it and wrote, “Let God.”

I had realized in this couple of hours in listening to Mel’s words that her ideas which once served the very template of survival that I had adopted and lived by were the very problem that keeps us stuck in the human ego of things. We love how that word rolls off of our tongues, “empowerment” and the phrase “take your power back” is the doorway that rips us out of helplessness and sends a spark of doing back into our whole system. It’s the speech that calls for the Rocky anthem to start playing inside of our thoughts as we pick up a pair of sneakers and decide we can go run a marathon uphill while singing “Eye of a Tiger” and expect a crowd of fans to meet us when we reach the top of the hill. Yes, we love winners. We love over-comers. The human pysche is designed to celebrate the underdog that rises to be king and the methodologies that hand us the key to our own pathways up the mountain.

I could see the characters in my own life speaking through her words as I thought about broken relationships and the seed of selfishness that is so dominant today in humans walking this planet. Everyone has drank the Koolaid it seems. We have a society full of people who worship their own wants, desires and enjoyment of life at the expense of forfeiting real connection. We discard what doesn’t fit comfortably. We go silent when the urge to fight for connection rises up inside of us and we take no accountability for the condition of mankind or the world around us because it’s just too stressful to do so. So we take our ball and go home while skipping along the sidewalk singing, “Let them.” And then we wonder why the world is going to shit in a hand basket at lightning speeds.

That’s why my inner voice never spoke the things that I had learned in my lifetime to an audience that would eat it up and then one day look back at my words through the eyes of selfishness and say, “I took a wrong turn.” The path of least resistance sounds so brilliant and easy. It sounds so freeing. It accomplishes nothing. I would imagine there are many in the generations that walk this earth today who will lay on their death beds in a moment of epiphany looking back over their time here spent on this planet in a pool of regret as they realize they did nothing to leave the collective in a better place. They contributed nothing outside of enjoying themselves and a life lived for the sake of “self” is a life lived in a shallow shadow of utter emptiness.

Where would be today if the ones before us just said, “Let them”? Can you imagine if Martin Luther King had said, “Oh well. Let them.” Or what if the forefathers who stood up on a suicide mission to stand for freedom had never crafted the Constitution and gave life to a land that would push forward in the name of Liberty? Do I promote the wars that these people had to fight for the sake of what they believed to be right? No and yes. The truth is that we shouldn’t have ever dropped so low in the name of equality in the first place for such an imbalance to exist. And the truth is also that we should be grateful that warriors existed with the courage to stand up for what is right and to pave the way for a better future for the generations that would come there after. And the truth is that we are regressing as a nation full of bratty toddlers who throw our hands up in adversity and allow everything that mattered to be destroyed for the sake of our own temporary comfort. We don’t want to be bothered or tried. We don’t want to be tested in our moral compass of things we just want to know what’s for dinner and find a good song to listen to on our way to work.

The Let Them theory is the fall of humanity because it forgets that what is in the one is in the whole. To not love your neighbor as yourself and desire to see justice in things that cause homelessness, sickness, inequality and a loss of common decency one to another is to be part of the problem itself. What a waste of life.

Perhaps the epiphany that came so strongly to me in listening to this audiobook was a self-realization stirring within that pointed the finger back at me. I have been silent. I have been walking the road of least resistance. I have been seeking peace in a world that’s literally falling apart at the seems and sticking my head in the sand as if such a thing can be put out of sight and out of mind. I have known the answer and kept my mouth shut because on the other side of awakening to a greater truth I’ve been waiting for the seeds to turn into a harvest that hasn’t yet come.

The answer is love.

As a woman who’s been betrayed be love over and over throughout my entire life here I say these words with no physical evidence in my own life other than the shaking of my own soul to see it’s error. Self survival is empowering the human ego and the more powerful the ego becomes the weaker the spirit of the soul becomes. Only in humility can we learn this. When we are struck down into a dark night of the soul and all of the old ways of being no longer work we are forced to look up at find a greater truth. It’s painful. It’s destructive. It’s suffocating. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. Then, it’s truth.

CHAPTER 2

The most powerful book I’ve ever read isn’t on a New York Times Best Seller list. Few people have ever heard of it and I wouldn’t have had reason to pick it up had my path not let me to a season where an ICU room became my temporary home. The book titled “More God” was gifted to me by a nurse in the nuero-science brain injury floor at TIRR hospital in Houston while I was clinging to the bedside of a loved one who was in the valley between life and death.

The book seemed to be divinely gifted to me at the very moment I needed it most. Nate didn’t write from a place of theory or pyshological hogwash. His words traced through time as he recollected a documentary of his walk through death and a long recovery process. His brain was so severely injured he couldn’t form words or communicate to the outside world. He was locked in a type of prison in side of a broken body that few us will experience. But there, he found God. In that silence. In that brokenness. In that horrific reality where hope was not something the outside world of physical matter could offer to him.

Nate’s story inspired me to write our story as we traveled through the same walls of tragedy and a life struck down in a type of reset button that shifted the very ground beneath our feet. I wasn’t the one stuck in a body that no longer functioned. I became the observer and the storyteller. But to do such a thing I had to go deep into the hurt and the pain. I had to allow my own heart to merge with my ex-husband’s and to feel the urgency so intracately that my very own breath inside of my own lungs clang to the experience of walking through the shadows of the valley of death.

The thing about life, when we take on the position of standing outside of the fire in attempt to gleam into the lessons and call ourselves an expert of a thing is that it doesn’t allow us to get off so easy. No one gets to the place of glory without going through the darkness first. When I answered the call to write what I witnessed in miracles that happened before my eyes I was also saying “yes” to go deeper through my own doorway to refinement.

The true seed that Nate’s book had inserted into my soul wasn’t consciously known to me for many years there after. I held onto the blood and the tears and the grit of his documentary. I saw the miracles of physical matter changed, science defied and logic tossed out the door. But the real reshaping that was taking place inside of my heart as I read his story and began crafting my own was in the outcome of it all. One thought kept returning to me. The man who endured hell met his wife in the hospital and found his purpose in his pain.

Literally the woman who cared for his broken body when he was made into an alien type figure with a skull cut to pieces and a helmet on his head later became his wife – the ER nurse. And the calling he answered on the other side of healing was to testify of what God had done and to start an organization where he would teach surfing to children who had brain and spinal injuries. Nate found higher love, higher purpose and a beautiful new season to life on the other side of unthinkable tragedy and darkness.

When my ex-husband served me divorce papers in 2019 I saw my entire future crumble before me. Everything I thought my life would become and the purpose I thought I had gleamed in wisdom that I might share with the world one day was brought to nothing – ashes beneath my feet. I lost my vision, my perceived future and my own identity in one single day. There would never be a ministry of ashes to beauty in a love story of self sacrifice and redemption for me. I would never write a part two to the documentary that was crafted inside of four walls where medical machines and the sounds of hearts departing in flat tones became my inspiration of hope and life after near-death. Everything I believed would happen was destroyed and I had no compass to lead me forward.

Three years later I arrived at epiphany moment when I recalled a manuscript for a fiction novel that I had worked on years before. Back in 2015 I wrote in notebooks the story of a a woman named Skyla who lost her husband through tragedy and went through a very dark time in her life. She decided it was her life mission on the planet to release a documentary of her final season in love and then she fell into a deep depression and decided she would take her own life. The woman met a man who threw a curveball into her plans. She fell in love. Then love left again as it always had done to her and she struggled to make sense of it all taking on a journey of self-discovery and following signs she believed might be sent from something greater than human existence – messages from Heaven.

It was odd – this epiphany. I realized that the manuscripts looked very similar to the events that had taken place in my own life. Although I didn’t have those notebooks anymore as they had been trashed many years ago in a construction project that I had to complete on our home, I remembered the main points of the book. I remembered the characters and even the visions that still circulated in my thoughts – like places I’d been before. Anyone who writes in the creative arts can attest to this truth – the visions that come in waves of what we call brainstorming are never truly lost. We see with our minds what we seek to then describe or make manifest in a work of writing a story or crafting a piece of art. The power of the imagination is quite a phenomenon.

This realization was unsettling. I didn’t know what to to make of it. I did believe in prophecies but not really. I was the character of the Doubting Thomas if I were placed in biblical times. I needed to see the proof. I needed to say the wounds on the hands of Jesus to believe he was truly the one who my eyes didn’t know how to recognize. But my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to pursue a project of discovery; giving everything I owned away to a church and taking an airline job where I would go out into the world and find myself – or find this story – or find anything that could made sense anymore.

My travels led me through many discoveries about humans, cultures, lifestyles and the mirroring effect that seem to exist in every encounter along the way. I saw my own passions, pain and desires in so many different walks of life and further began to understand how connected we all truly are. At the surface we may look different, speak different and even carry on very different functions in the world but at the soul level we all want to be loved, accepted, seen, known and to belong to something that makes us feel alive.

Through this period I dabbled in all kinds of spirituality. Carrying with me my biblical roots in growing up in a home that was full of Sunday church sessions, bible studies and the teachings of Jesus, I wanted to know more. I wanted to see how others lived in walked in their moral systems of what they believe. I met psychics, doctors, scientists, psychotherapists and beyond – all of which left a mark on my heart in various ways. But through it all I didn’t find what I was looking for.

In the background I began crafting a new documentary and hiding away my writings and even video entries that gave me a space to be vulnerable with myself. I tied the events in my life back to that book of Skyla and somewhere deep inside of me in a place that I can only describe as “insanity” I believed that my life path may lead me to where the character in my book ended up. She was gifted a second chance to live again – a new chapter written in the stars by the author of love himself – God.

There’s a Bible scripture that I often think about as the inside of me shudders in deep pain. It says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” I can see this had become my condition. I was hoping for something that never came. I was searching for something that I never got to embrace. I was waiting for something that never arrived. Love.

Last night I cried. I laid in bed with my beautiful dog stretched out over my belly as if he was comforting a wounded child and I let the tears flow into rivers of pain – allowing all that I had hoped for to be released from me one teardrop at a time. Then I picked myself up and I sat in front of a large floor mirror in the corner of my room, staring at my own reflection. And then it came to me.

For the last nine years I’ve been writing a documentary that was centered around me. I’ve been stewing in the depths of suffering because I thought that in capturing the events of a woman who’s life had been destroyed piece by piece – who was then redeemed by God and given a new beginning was my purpose. I wanted to produce a real life documentary on love – divine love sent from Heaven. I wanted to share a story that would inspire others to keep their hearts open and to keep walking in faith through the depths of despair and to know that God has a plan for these broken hearts. I wanted to produce something that could give hope to people like me. I wanted to be the living, walking, talking example of a modern day Job story and through this I believed that God had called me to such a purpose.

I was missing one thing – God. What if he didn’t choose to give me the happy ending? All of my work is in vain. To walk in the idea that I’m the subject of a promise from Heaven is to expect Heaven to deliver it to me and I don’t have any control over that.

So in wrapping up my attempt at speaking through a voice of wisdom as I think through the last 24-hours of epiphany moments I would say this; the “let them theory” gives us keys to control our lives and reap the benefits of such in all areas except the only one that truly matters – Love. So what’s the point of any of it if we carry all of our accolades, achievements, comforts and well-being across a finish line where the perishable things stare back at us with a soul shaking sorrowful moment of truth… It’s all meaningless. Vanity. Empty. Void.

And in that truth we find the dichotomy of all effort that we ever put forth toward anything in our human experience here on earth. In the one thing that matters the most – Love – we don’t get to be the author.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to ever tell my story. Maybe my story only lives in the pages of a manuscript that was never even seen or read by a single human eye before it tossed in the trash and buried in a land field where it was lost forever. But I can still tell the story of love. I believe in it. I believe in Nate’s miracle and I believe there’s an entire generation of young people who are being brought up by a sick world where social media has become the grand teacher of lives chasing instant gratification, fame and self-worth built on “follower count” that feeds the flesh and kills the soul.

I believe in the story of my grandparents who fought through thick and thin to love one another in 50-plus years of marriage to never find wealth or fame but the hearts they touched with their substance left an imprint on me that I will never shake. So many stories are out there – untold. The people who find true joy are the ones who find meaningful connections and no longer need an audience or a pat on the back from a broken world to know they have arrived at what they were sent to this planet to find.

So I will write the “Love them Theory”. Here and now from a place of brokenness where I have nothing of my own to share other than a laundry list of what “not to do” in the roads I’ve traveled through self-seeking comfort and I’ll pray a new prayer today – for God to send me those chosen ones. I seek to tell the stories untold of the Nate Lyttle’s out there in this world who never needed their names in lights or their faces plastered on posters and screens because they found the secret of life in the sacred places of God’s immortal pen – the script in the sky that flows down from the windows of Heaven and blesses the human heart with a treasure incomparable to anything that can be tarnished and stripped away.

Love is the only thing that is immortal. It’s the only that we leave behind when our bodies turn to dust and it’s an essence that nothing in existence can destroy or take away.

Let the pages of love flow through my fingers in the stories of those who wish to share the gift they have found with a world that needs to hear it now more than ever.

So it is – in Jesus’ name….. Amen….