Today's Challenge: Ensure that all your interactions today express love, concern, compassion and kindness.

Today's Quotation:

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough; money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go; first of all in your own home. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next-door neighbor.

Mother Teresa

Today's Meditation:

All too often, when we think of giving, we think of financial gifts and material goods. And although it is very important that people have money and things, as Mother Teresa points out, "these things are not enough." Money and things can be obtained, or even replaced, but love cannot. And people need to be loved. They need to know that their lives matter, that their concerns are heard, and that their importance exists.

So much of the ills of our societies exist because people feel unloved. Heartbreak and depression--a result of feeling rejected and unloved--are cause for the majority of the harmful and negative things people do in life. Just imagine how much less crime, misery, and hatred would exist in this world if people just felt loved.

So how can I go about spreading love throughout this world? Can I give love to others without making them feel uncomfortable? Can I give love in appropriate and meaningful ways? Can I give love equally and without conditions to those who are close to me as well as to complete strangers?

This world needs our love. Spread it through service toward your fellow man, through encouragement and genuine concern, through compliments and compassion, and through any other meaningful contributions you can make in the lives of others. And although our loving efforts may seem small, or we may not always see the results of them, the differences they make are tangible and essential for all of life.

Today's Challenge: Ensure that all your interactions today express love, concern, compassion and kindness.

Questions to consider:

In what ways do you give? In what ways do you try to spread love?

Think of someone you know as a loving person. What are some of the things this individual does that make you consider them to be so loving?

What are some excuses for not spreading love? How legitimate are these reasons? If you do not spread your love because of these reasons, can your love be unconditional?

For further thought:

You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.

Amy Carmichael