Translating a World on the Edge

We fight for what we love.

And we love what we fight for.

Sound the same? They’re not.

We’ll fight for the things we love right now–members of our family, our home, our allegiances. We’d fight for these anytime or any day.

But then there are spur of the moment situations we may be forced into, where we must fight, and only afterwards discover that we’ve come to love the thing we’re fighting for. It may be a principle, it may be a person, it may be something we never imagined.

I did not know I loved the Catholic Church until I became a young teen and had to defend her.

I did not know I loved life, and babies in the womb, until I nearly lost one of my own.

I did not know I could love an enemy, until an enemy became a friend.

I did not know I would come to love simple things, until simple things were all I had.

I did not know I was able to forgive, until the lack of forgiveness nearly got the best of me.

And on, and on, and on.

We love what we have to fight for because these things make a great impression upon us. In fact, they cut into our hearts and change us inside. They change the perceptions we have of ourselves and of others.

Where does the strength of this Fighting Love come from? I believe it comes from God’s grace, sent to us when we need it. In the Catholic Church, we call this sort of grace, Actual Grace, which refers to God’s interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification. Actual Grace is prolific–it has to be for imperfect Human Beings who are famous for ‘starting over’ again and again. If we ask, and allow Him to do so, God will intervene in our lives each time we need Him to.

This is Fighting Love. The kind of grace we need to get through this life, and into the next one.