A Love Movement

About a year ago I became involved in an incredibly cool organization called To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA). In their own words:

To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.

More impressive than their mission is their vision.

A Love Movement.

That's what they call it. It sounds simplistic and yet it is transforming lives. Lives that have been broken, overcome by sadness, cut and consumed by substance. People that would be the last to be loved, the last to expect love, the last to ask to be loved. And yet A Love Movement is what is saving their lives. Every month I get to send handwritten letters and art work to people that have turned to TWLOHA for help and have entered residential treatment just to tell them that they are loved. Me, a stay at home Mom in Indiana, telling people that I will never know that they are valued and that they are loved. That blows my mind.

A Love Movement.

Tomorrow is To Write Love On Her Arms day. A day where we will write Love on our arms to raise awareness about the struggle that millions of people all around us are dealing with. I think that sometimes it is easy to look at someone who faces addiction, depression or self injury and think that could never be you.

But I know it could be me. I know just how close I am to it being me. To want to feel something so badly that even feeling pain is better than being numb. To deal with noises that are loudest in silence. To crave an escape from things real and imagined. I can look back at my life and I can rearrange circumstances and experiences like puzzle pieces and all of the sudden I am there. I am that person. The one that breaks to bleed. The one that gets high to forget. The one that hurts to feel.

And yet it's not me. It's them. It's those people that I feel so drawn to. I can't help but to think that if Jesus were giving the sermon on the mount today, these are the ones that he would point to when he spoke about the meek. These are the people for whom the blessing would be given, those that would inherit the earth. That is incredible to me.