Love|Balms is... | Part I | ...My Living Journey Towards Belovedness
Part I | Love|Balms is…
My living journey towards belovedness. My name is Joy Bronson, and I’m on an intentional journey of healing towards wholeness and fulfilled life, not just back to where I was “before things went wrong.”
And quite a bit has gone wrong, or at least not well. The people I should most expect to love me have harmed me. And I have harmed folks that I do love, and should love. I don’t want to return to how I was, how we were. And it’s not that all harm is avoidable, so much as quite a bit of it is, and also signals a lack of conscious intent to and understanding of love.
We will sometimes disagree with family. But we can choose to fight together with the hope of finding our way towards one another, or to fight against one another for the sole purpose of being the one that is “correct,” and even emotionally crushing a loved one for a sense of our own dominance. The pain felt in the death of loved ones is inevitable. The personal, communal, and global traumas borne of genocides, imperialist wars, maltreatment of refugees, and murders of transgender women are not.
I’m beyond tired of hurting, and of hurting others, of others hurting for no reason. I’m sick and tired of all of us being sick and tired. I desire so much for us to live and be well. I want us to live forward to the vision of loving relationship in which I hope we can be together, that I can be with my genuine Self.
So I began engaging my life journey asking: What do the overwhelming absence of love, evident in the amount of hurt that we have endured and caused, tell us about what is missing or misaligned in how we understand living life?[
That God created each and all of us beloved and to love means we are not to accept and settle for violence, and even mediocre treatment, conditions, relationships, or behavior from or with others. It means that we should not perpetuate or encourage it ourselves. That God created each and all of us beloved means that we are here to Be(loved), and to #LoveOnPurpose.
My be(ing)lovedness, my life, and my healing matter. So do you and yours. Each of our living and our flourishing as we are created and called to be(loved) matters. Yet notice that if we name any hurt, abuse, even form of mediocrity—against our own selves and against others—the purpose of each and all of them is to drive us away from being and living as our whole and beloved Selves. To make us question if we can be who we know that we are, because this group and this rhetoric claims that this aspect of our identity is less than, or even that we don’t exist…according to them, as if they are God.
Living as we are created to and innately desire to be is itself liberation. Discovering and living our belovedness—as our full, whole beings—is liberation.
My focus in life is to take my place, and take my space. Because my greatest gift in this world is to know and live that I am created and God-gifted to be.
