+ Bev's Corner - along with a guest blogger on All We Need is Love - BALM

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Bev’s Corner – along with a guest blogger on All We Need is Love

BALM | February 13, 2020

Bev’s Corner

As we move toward Valentines Day with an eye toward expanding the love in our hearts, I wanted to share with you a beautiful blog post written by our new Outreach Representative, BALM Coach Bill Guy.

A BALMer for almost a year now who lost his son to SUD in September of 2017, Bill has been a Parent Educator in the family recovery field for the last few years as he has searched for a truly holistic program that he feels has the best chance of helping families help their loved ones. So, when he came to the coach training, he had a deep understanding of what was and is out there for families and, as a result, developed a profound appreciation for what the BALM offers.

This blog addresses the need so many are expressing right now for a little more love in the world. We BALMers seek and find that love everyday in the inner and outer work we do to bring recovery to ourselves and our families…Thank you Bill for sharing the universality of the desire for harmony and love with us today…

All We Need Is Love 

by Bill Guy, BALM Outreach Representative and Coach Trainee

More and more, as it seems the world is either burning or crumbling around us, I find wisdom in the teachings common to most benevolent traditions, but perhaps first expressed most eloquently, in the Jewish Mishna, known as the “Oral Torah:” 

“Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.”

It was then echoed in the Koran: 

“Whoever saves one life, it is written as if he has saved all humanity.”

And in the Christian scriptures, this passage seems to be a reflection: St. Matthew 25: 37-40, 

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

 

One can hear reverberations in Humanist Manifesto III:

  • Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals.
  • Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.
  • Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by all the division, the animosity. I wonder if the center will hold. What is the center? Where is it? How can we buttress it if we find it?

Then, I remember that old Serenity Prayer.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.”

It can seem such a cliché . . . until you have to grasp it in a death grip to stomach getting out of bed in the morning.

It urges us to let go of what isn’t our business to fix, to get busy with what is and most importantly, to have enough grace and grit to know which is which.

Who IS our brother (sister, et.al.)? We likely have the answer somewhere within the recesses of our hearts. May we have the empathy and the courage to find it, to heed it.

All we need is love . . . truly, love is all we need.

 

 

 

With appreciation to Bill and to all of the BALM coaches who toil day and night to bring more love into the lives of their families, and all of the BALM families willing to go within in order to move forward with love. As we learn in the BALM and from the great Beatle Paul McCartney

Love truly IS the answer – on this day and every other!

 

Happy Valentines Day!

 

Love,

Bev