On the other side of resistance is love.

This phrase came to me while I was reading a story posted at Yahoo News this morning about a young girl whose request to bring her girlfriend to prom in Mississippi may have lead to the school board cancelling prom altogether. What was interesting for me in reading the story and the comments below was all the resistance. I saw resistance in the young lesbians comments about living in the “bible belt”, in the school officials policy against same sex couples attending prom, in many of the comments from both conservatives and liberals on this issue and most of all, in myself. Every single person involved, without exception, is loved. Everyone of them is accepted. Everyone of them is cared for, without condition. When we believe that anyone, including and especially ourselves, is unacceptable, unworthy of consideration, undeserving of compassion, and not fit to be treated with the same kindness we would extend towards our family and friends, we feel it. We feel it as anger, as contempt, as denial, as discomfort and so much more. We feel it as a kind of “wrongness”. The moment we decide to latch on to unlovingness, we create resistance, which breeds conflict of all kinds. The good news is, that this resistance is an opportunity to reveal to ourselves where we most want to experience freedom to love. Because love is what is on the other side of resistance, along with peace and joy. Love, the ineffable mystery at the heart of absolute everything, welcomes all, without exception. Apparently, this was something I needed to remember.

I wrote this for myself and was inspired to post it here in the hopes that it might be useful for someone else as well.

Do you yahoo? No.

Life is choice. That lesbian could have been smart and just showed up at the dance with her "friend" and avoided the whole issue.

True. She could have. But according to the story I read, the school rules explicitly stated that senior prom dates be of the opposite sex. That was why she went to school officials to get special permission and was told she would be asked to leave if her and her date made other students feel “uncomfortable”. So the issue would likely not have been avoided had she just showed up with her date.