You have two ‘super powers’

Superheroes have secret super powers. Human beings, all human beings, have two.

But most of us only use one – and our other super power (which ever it is) puzzles us.

You have the power of knowledge and you have the power of love.

Which one do you spend the most time exercising? If you are stuck in a tricky situation which one is your default mode?

For example, if you are faced with a challenging situation your default approach might be to use the power of knowledge. You want to think of a solution. You want to research all the relevant information. You want to understand why this challenge has arisen.

All well and good. But some challenging situations simply will not be solved with your intellect. Some challenging situations will only budge if you lean into your other super power: the power of love.

What??? you say …. (or even sing) ‘What’s love got to do with it?’

Love is your under-developed superpower. For most of us anyway. There are some who major in love and are content to live life without knowledge or at least with very little knowledge or understanding.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let me make a case for the limits of your power to know stuff. You might even pride yourself on your intellect, your ability to think clearly, to rationalise, to gather data, to make informed choices. For you, being in your head, thinking things through is your ‘safe space’. If you can ‘get your head’ round it maybe you can control it. And ‘bang’ – there! Right there is the key word: control.

Those of us who over rely on our power to know (and under develop our power to love) have fallen for a lie: ‘the more I know, the more information I have, the more control I have over things that I don’t like’. This is mostly not true. Knowledge will simply give you facts, it doesn’t bestow on you an ability to change those facts. It might help you negotiate around the brutal fact that you’ve been diagnosed with cancer but it won’t actually change that.

‘But Sheila’ people say to me, ‘it’s the not knowing that’s so hard’ and I get that, I really do. But we would do well to remember that there are somethings that it’s better not to know, the date of your own death for example.

We persist in the false belief that if we only know stuff, we’ll be better equipped to deal with it.

The reality is that we can know as much as there is to know and still be totally overwhelmed, utterly flummoxed or completely confused as to the best way forward.

This is where our second ‘superpower’ comes into its own. It is when we exercise the power to lovingly accept all that we do not understand that we begin to find peace.

Imagine someone you love does something stupid and you cannot understand why they did it. Trying to understand won’t ultimately help. It is only the power to love that can get you both beyond whatever it was they did, assuming you want to get beyond it. We don’t ‘get over’ some events in our lives and relationships. We don’t get to rewind time and live as if what ever it was didn’t happen. But when there is love, intentional patience and a desire to maintain a relationship beyond any kind of difficult event, then there is hope.

Some people do naturally lean more into their power to love rather than their power to understand. Their hearts rather than their heads, for example most children and those who have remained ‘child-like’ due to limitations on their development. As most of us ‘grow up’ and progress through the education system it is sad that our intellectual capacities often appear to be more highly valued than our emotional capacities such as being empathetic, compassionate, intuitive.

What we measure reveals what we value. Exam grades, degrees or doctorates are not what make a person good, loving or even like-able.

Are these super powers equal in value. Is one better than the other? That’s like comparing truth and beauty or justice and forgiveness. I don’t want to live in a world where I’d have only one or other of these pairs. These qualities are vitally different but equally vital.

But maybe, just maybe, Love is the trump card: ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things. Three things abide: faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love’ 1 Corinthians 13

Lord, help me not to over-rate or over rely on my capacity to understand, especially not at the expense of failing to exercise my capacity to love.