‘The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us and save us’

By David McElroy · December 31, 2018

“What is the world’s greatest lie?” the little boy asks.
The old man replies, “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
— Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist”

The beginning of a new year is a good time for me to re-read Paulo Coelho’s powerful novel, “The Alchemist.” Although the lessons are taught through the narrative of young Santiago, the book isn’t as much traditional literature as it as a reminder of things which I’ve always known are true.

When I was a young man, my thoughts at the beginning of a year were about what I was going to cause to happen in the next year. As I experienced more of life, it became easier to believe I was just waiting to see what life would bring to me — as though fate controlled everything and I was merely along for the ride.

On this New Year’s Eve, my thoughts are more like those I experienced in my younger years. I’m looking toward what I am going to cause to happen. I’m looking toward my dreams — the big ones and the small ones — and I’m letting Coelho remind me that, “It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

This has been a long year for me. It started with emergency room visits and surgery to remove my gallbladder. After that, there were good days and bad days, but more good than bad. I’m still slowly moving away from the dark days that hit me hard about six or seven years ago. But I’m not yet where I want to be — and I wonder why.

Re-reading “The Alchemist” reminds me that I don’t yet have the things I want because I still fear seizing them. I still fear failure. I still fear leaping from a high cliff with faith that the net will appear before I hit bottom.

I once had complete faith that I could do anything I wanted, but life has a way of beating you down and making you wonder if you were ever what you believed you were. Reading this book again makes me remember that my beliefs and passion control whether I get what I’m seeking.

As Coelho writes, “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Although this sounds mystical, the modern-day Brazilian writer is just echoing what Jesus taught us 2,000 years ago. In the Gospel of Mark, we’re told that Jesus taught the same thing when he said, “Have faith in God. I assure you that whoever tells this hill to get up and throw itself in the sea and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. For this reason I tell you: When you pray and ask for something, believe that you have received it, and you will be given whatever you ask for.”

This idea appears in the spiritual and philosophical teachings of various civilizations, but we modern people think we’re too smart to believe such things. We tend to be cynical and say, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” when the truth is that what Jesus taught tells us that we will see it when we believe it — just the opposite of the way we operate.

So for 2019, I’m working toward changing my thoughts and beliefs, because what I believe is going to be what I receive. I can achieve all the things I want. I can be whatever I want. But I first have to believe and then step out in faith along that path.

But what of love? Can we just believe we’re going to have love and it will just appear? I can’t tell you that, because love is something we can’t control. My experience is that I can’t control who I love or how intensely I love. And even if I could control someone else — to bring her love and presence to me — I wouldn’t overturn her own will, because that wouldn’t respect her.

Love is something which Coelho addresses in complicated ways in his novels, but he teaches that love is central to the reason we are here in this life. In his novel, “By The River Pedra I Sat Down And Wept,” he writes of our responsibility of accepting love.

“Love is always new,” Coelho writes. “Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness. The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us.”

My experience is that love makes the rest of life worth living. Without love, all the money and power and possessions in the world would be worthless. Nothing would be worth having. As Coelho said, love “is what nourishes our existence.”

It seems to be a paradox. We can’t cause love to come when we need it. We have to endure “hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness” when we don’t have what we need. Yet the only way out of this sadness is to continue to seek love. So love seems to inevitably be about both happiness and disappointment. It seems we can’t have the fruit of real love without a lot of loneliness before it comes.

Few things can really damage a human soul like loneliness, but it seems as though we have to endure the pain of loneliness as we wait for the love which seeks us. Again, Coelho doesn’t try to sugar-coat this pain of waiting.

“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness,” he writes in his novel, “Eleven Minutes.” “It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”

So if I conclude that I can find a way to have the other things which I want in life — but I have to endure pain for love — does that mean we should throw away love when it doesn’t materialize as we need it to?

Coelho doesn’t think so. He teaches that all of Creation has brought us to love someone because we sought that love.

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you,” he writes in “The Alchemist.”

Does that imply that there’s no free will? Does that imply we’re fated to do whatever some impersonal fate gives us? Not in the least. It means that if we love someone — really love the person with real love as opposed to its many counterfeits — we can’t escape it and we shouldn’t try.

“You will never be able to escape from your heart,” Coelho writes. “So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.”

My heart doesn’t make life easy for me. Life would be easier if I wanted simpler and more available things, but I have a feeling that if I accepted one of the more available choices — those which don’t move my heart — I would end up even worse. Because the only thing in life worse than not being with the right partner is to be stuck with the wrong one.

Years ago, I told God what I wanted. All of Nature conspired to show her to me. Until that changes, I have to listen to my heart. Since I can’t escape it, I listen to what my heart has to say, even at the cost of loneliness for the present.

I believe 2019 will be a good year for me. I might be stuck waiting for the love I need, but I’m redoubling my faith that I can still be the world-changing man who I saw in my future as a little boy. If I don’t have faith in myself, how is anybody else going to believe in me?

Let’s believe that we’re going to create for ourselves in 2019 all that we’ve needed to find.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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