Once again I sit in the hole reflecting: Next month I will
have been physically incarcerated for ten years, and while most of
it has been in holes and a control unit, my transformation is such
that I truly believe wouldn’t have been possible if I wasn’t locked
in the holes and in a control unit. You see I wasn’t a bad person,
far from it. In fact, most people would say that I was a good
“brotha”. However, I was an adult who hated himself, while saying
that I loved me and would tell anybody who asked the same
thing. You see, like many, I thought that adulthood meant manhood
as well and so at 18, in my mind, I became a man. Like
many, I’ve experimented with all types of drugs, drank and lived a
reckless life, only hooked on cigarettes, thank God, but I still
thought that was not a reflection of self-hate. It wasn’t until I
came to understand what a man was and what love is that I came
to see that, at 30 plus, I wasn’t a man nor did I love me. Can you
imagine the shock, the resistance to this realization?
When I learned that love means to protect and so when
you say that you love you that you mean you are willing to and do
protect you from what is harmful to you then that means you
don’t smoke, drink alcohol, live a reckless life, follow impure principles
and all of that. It means to understand that God is love and
in this issue we know that the gift of life that God gave is pure and
God’s love is pure and that we don’t appreciate God’s pure love
by being impure. You see to pollute our minds, our bodies, our
souls, our earth, our air, our food is all harmful to us and accepting
any of that isn’t love of self. When we say that we love God
and we accept any of that, then we don’t protect the purity of
God’s representation of God. You see God’s love is pure and not
impure so we cannot say through words or actions that we love
God and turn around and find pleasure in the impure and be representatives
of the true God that is pure and do harm to life, the
ultimate expression of God’s love for us. See, if life is pure and so
to love life is to protect life from what is impure, this is loving life,
what I came to see.
When I came to accept God’s love, which is the understanding
of how to live pure, which is to preserve the pure by
rejecting the impure, then I was able to grow into manhood.
From this level of growth I was able to and to continue to show
others how to love them. Showing that unless one truly understands
and loves themselves first, then they cannot love others.
