Lost in Love

It is a common complaint made by people in relationships that they lose their identity.

Hear the complaint carefully. Nobody loses an identity in love. What is lost is an attachment — and we grieve the attachment and call it ourselves.

The first love is the temporal love. It runs on a linear scale: mine and yours, before and after, what I had and what I might lose. It loves what can be seen, held, dated, and possessed — a face, a name, a role, a body, a future planned in straight lines. When the line breaks, we say, "I have lost myself." But a self that can be lost with a circumstance was only ever a circumstance wearing our name.

There is another discovery, and it does not travel in a straight line.

Seek yourself honestly and the search crosses dimensions of this universe. You find the self embodied in all others: the stranger's sorrow registers in your own chest before your mind can explain it; the child's joy rises in you as if it were yours — because it is. And just as surely, you find all others embodied in the self. We are not sealed units trading pieces of identity back and forth. We are one life, meeting itself in many forms.

This is the positive ID.

A positive identification is not made by the temporal evidence — not by the role, the record, or the reflection. It is made by the knowledge of the Most High God inside of self, and the recognition of that same God inside of others. When you know Him in you, you cannot un-know Him in them. Every face becomes a confirmation. Every encounter becomes a recognition.

So be lost in love — but be lost in the right love. Lose the attachments that time can take. Lose the small identity that had to be defended. And find the identity that cannot be lost, because it was never yours alone: it is His, in you, in me, in all of us.

Have you ever truly lost yourself — or did you only lose what you were holding?

J.