Love and the Fire That Burns

Love is sometimes gentle hands and sometimes a fire, bright enough to show us what we had hidden from ourselves.

But fire is not proof of love. A wound is not devotion. No one must be broken to become worthy of truth.

Human love changes. It draws near, asks for distance, returns with an apology, or ends when staying would ask too much of the soul.

We can honor what a relationship revealed without calling every pain a lesson. We can leave the battlefield without denying the tenderness that once lived there.

There is another love I meet in prayer, not as a promise I can prove, but as an ocean beneath the weather, a presence I reach for when human hands cannot stay.

I call it God. Someone else may call it mercy, breath, or the quiet refusal to abandon oneself.

This love does not ask me to remain inside the flame. It does not confuse endurance with faith. It gathers what survived and says: you may begin again.

The fire may change us. It may also simply hurt. Either way, we are allowed to step toward water, to tend the burns, and to choose a love that does not require them.