Does Love Win?

(or is that the wrong question)

“"Love is the bridge between you and everything."” (Rumi)

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Does love win?

It’s a question I’ve found myself asking again and again this week.
It’s what I’ve preached and lauded and even read books titled, Love Wins, by Rob Bell (which I loved when I read it, BTW).

But I feel tapped out — like the world is unraveling at the seams: heartbreak after heartbreak, floods taking the lives of little girls at summer camp, people I care about in deep crisis, the news a constant echo of rage and pain.

Closer to home, shoes keep dropping and I keep trying to catch them all — but I’m only one person, and there always seems to be another falling. My body feels it: the wired, restless nights, the ache that settles deep in my bones.

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When life spins on like this — wars raging, hopes dashed, despair settling like heavy fog — it’s tempting to cling to that question: Will love win in the end? We long for the comfort that all this pain will add up to something good, that one day we’ll see Love standing victorious — crowned and cheered on like a champion who conquered evil once and for all.

But maybe that’s not the question we need to be asking. Maybe winning was never what Love came here to do.

Maybe Love was never meant to stand on a podium, crowned the winner. Maybe Love is not the one who conquers, but the ground beneath the fight itself.

Maybe Love is the soil — the unseen mycelium (that’s a fun word) weaving quiet networks below our feet, rooting us to each other and to something bigger than all this unraveling.

Maybe Love is not in competition with anything. Maybe that’s the silliest notion we’ve ever come up with.

Maybe Love is the steady pulse, the ancient hush that whispers: Even in all of this, I stay. I’m not going anywhere.

As the week marched on, even with all these maybes echoing in my head, I still caught myself falling back into the old story — scanning the headlines, peering into my own small world, desperate for proof that Love was winning. Old messages take a long time to untangle, don’t they?

But even in the middle of that trap — that longing for Love to stand victorious like some champion — Love kept showing up anyway. Not as a conqueror, but as a companion. In the meal dropped off at the door. The money raised for a family drowning in sorrow. The friends who sat beside me on the couch so I didn’t have to hold the ache alone.

Love showed up in the smallest, gentlest ways — in whispered prayers, in kind hands, in roots that held steady in the depths, even when everything on the surface felt scorched.

I wish I could say I have a tidy ending for this. I don’t. I’m still sorting through my own mess — the conversations that need to be had, the rest that needs to be taken, the boundaries that need tending.

But maybe Love was never meant to tie things up neatly. Maybe it doesn’t need to prove itself. Maybe Love stays — and maybe that’s all I need to remember right now.

From my heart to yours,
Esther
🌀 Spiritual Director, Companion, and Fellow-Questioner

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P.S. How has Love stayed or showed up for you recently? Also, how did this resonate with you? Anything helpful? Prickly? Feel trite?

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