This current week of the counting the Omer is the week of Chesed (the day to day intention is included in the more detailed blog).
This week of Chesed is a reflection on love—our capacity for love, how we share it, how we can lose our balance in love and how it serves us to change ourselves.
In the book “The Five Languages of Love” author Gary Chapman provides the types of love he sees as vital to relationships and which he sees as the source of mismatches that often can create a block in a relationship—I want to be loved this way and you love me this way.
The love languages (how we communicate our love for another) are: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. While we could imagine many other languages of love it is powerful to recognize that the way I love or want to be loved may differ greatly from how someone else wants to be loved.
This past week a story unfolded of a family gathering for Passover with the patriarch of the family dying in hospice. He died on the first day of Passover, having celebrated his last seder with all his children gathered at the family home. There were all types of languages of love shared at the seder and the one unspoken one: I waited for you all to come home.
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