continued from The Real Love Letter
... to have flaws after it was cut. It was a difficult decision, because he would have to sell everything he had in order to make the purchase. In the end, he decided not to buy the diamond, because he wasn’t willing to make the sacrifice and assume the risk.
After he passed up the purchase, someone else bought the diamond. When it was cut, the diamond was found to be the largest perfect diamond ever discovered, and the owner sold it and the pieces cut from it for a greater profit than he could have imagined.
Real Love is a perfect diamond, and in order to enjoy it we must be willing to give up all of our unrelated possessions—our pride, our anger, our blaming, our defensiveness, and our addictive attachments to praise, power, pleasure, and safety. Giving up what we have—what has made us intermittently comfortable for a lifetime—to achieve something we’re not entirely certain of is the very definition of faith, but without this faith, and without the sacrifices that always attend faith, we can never find the Real Love we require to be happy in this life.
We all want to feel unconditionally loved. We all do. And we want the joy that comes with being unconditionally loving toward others. The question is, what are we willing to pay to possess this diamond? Are we willing to give up all that we have? Are we willing to give up the blaming and instead tell the truth about ourselves? Are we willing to give up our selfish wounds and demands, and instead see the needs of others? Are we willing to trade our anger for joy? When we’re willing to do this, our actions will tell the truth about our intentions, and the diamond will be ours.