Love Glorious Love

“Love is not just a nice feeling about someone. It is the pure and joyful pulse of the universe, and being in tune with it means you are in tune with the forces that bind together the stars on one hand and the atoms on the other. If we truly love each other, most differences become irrelevant and most forms of helping are pure delight.

Love literally has the power to cause change. During the 1970s, Ohio University conducted an experiment on rabbits, feeding them high-cholesterol diets and hoping to duplicate the effect that such a diet has on human arteries. "Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60 percent fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbits' diet could account for their high tolerance to the diet until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it; astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments, in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved, came up with similar results." (Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine [NewYork: Bantam Books, 1989], p. 33.)

The student could not change the diet or refuse to give the high-cholesterol food. But what he did was to define a new reality for the rabbits. He did not see them primarily as animals that were going to die. Instead, they were worth loving. Because his assignment was to be with them, he was kind and gentle. And somehow, that attention was enough. Something within the rabbit itself seemed to reorganize its body chemistry to resist the toxic diet.

This example calls to mind the Savior's promise: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." (John 10:10.) According to the measurements we usually use, for the most part Jesus did not make people's lives physically better. He fed the five thousand and healed the sick and even raised some from the dead, but his whole nation remained in political bondage. He didn't permanently improve anybodies standard of living or assure better jobs or good educations. Can we really say that he gave them a more abundant life?

Yes, he did. The Savior didn't want to give his followers a better version of the old life; he wanted to give them a new life. He gave them transformation, abundance, victory. And he did it by loving them. It is that same love that he feels for us, here and now”.(Chieko N Okazaki – ‘Lighten Up!’)