give a little bit of your love to me

From the beginning we demand. We scream for air, we scream for milk and we scream for the soft embrace of strong arms. As we grow up we learn a word that resonates through the ears of everyone around us – “mine.” Whatever stands in front of us instantly comes into our possession without even a second thought. We enter the adolescent years. The world is a sparkling phenomena where everything seen on the television is something that has to be ours or there is no way that we can truly be satisfied without it. Before we are ready, the teenage years approach. We soon find that we have so many needs and we wonder how we are ever going to get through life unless we get that shiny car, and Friday nights off from our minimum wage job. We finally graduate from high school and it’s off to college we go. We focus on our mental and emotional development, building relationships and studying all night in a brand new environment. The only thing on our minds is what we want in life, where we’ll work when we graduate and how much fun we can have in the mean time.


The funny thing about life so far is that all we’ve seemed to do is receive. Half the time we receive without even thinking about the fact that we have just been given. The warm arms that soothe our crying at three in the morning are lovingly given to us by our parents. The toys and the warm days spent in the park are given to us by our parents who still remember what it was like to have that same experience as a child. So many of those things seen on TV that we ask for come into our possession on Christmas morning by parents who give all the credit to a magical man in a red suit. In the teenage years the freedom of a vehicle and gas to fill it are graciously given to us by the two people who love us most. Finally, the freedom to leave the house and experience a whole new world of joy, pain, sorrow, and love are given to us. The beauty in it all, however, is that through this entire adventure that we call life, our parents gave us one more thing that is so easily overlooked. They gave us the gift of giving. We’ve experienced it our whole life, and now we get to do what they did. Give and give freely.