For almost a year now I’ve struggled with the idea of being deserving of some things. Deserving goodness, deserving happiness, deserving love. Being blamed and getting called names by people whom I used to think of as, at the very least, “old friends” was the worst and most painful (and freshest) memory I have of college. During and after everything, I often thought of being so undeserving of anything because they must have been right about something if they, as people who I’ve spent years with, would treat me that way. Maybe they were right about my being wrong about all of the things that happened. Maybe I really did not deserve to explain my version of the truth. Maybe I didn’t deserve to have my own point of view of things. Maybe I didn’t deserve explanations. Everything was my fault and I felt like I did not deserve anything at all.

At that time too, we were talking about the story of the Prodigal Son in sir Bobby Guevarra’s theology class. In our discussions, the saddest words I’ve ever heard were: we will never be enough for the World. The world will keep on taking, taking, taking from us and even after giving our whole selves to it, it will still never be enough. 

I’ve always tried my best to be useful to other people. I almost never said “no” to anything, always wanting to please them no matter what it was they asked from me. Never you mind that I was going to be butchered in the process. I thought that in that way I’ll get approval, I’ll be worthy of being considered a friend, a confidante, whathaveyou.

I was wrong. Although I still find it hard to say “no” to most people, although I still have this impulse to please everybody else, I’ve learned that it was never about being deserving of, or, about deserving anything.

Although from Theology class, Bobby Guevarra said that it was only God who could give us the limitless kind of love that not one person is worthy of. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t experience it from other people, also mere mortals like any other person is.

Last week, Isa wrote an article about undeserved love. She said:

Undeserved love means I don’t have to work for the love that I dream of. It is entirely possible in the here and in the now, in later, in tomorrow and in always.

Nothing in this world will inspire me as much as this kind of love. Because it took me in and wanted me, even though it had no reason to. It desired me, believed in me, and stuck around. I will become all the better because of it. And, at the end of it all, I might even grow into actually deserving it. Who knows?

I’ve experienced this in my closest friends, who at one point really lost the reason to love me — and yet they still did. Ruby always said she was scared the four of us would never be friends again after that, but for some reason things just worked out and they’re still the very best people I trust unreservedly among everyone else in this world.

C is also one of those people who inspires me to at least try to become better than who I am right now because of how he loves me even with all my issues (self-inflicted or not). He always deals with others far more generously than I do, deserving they are of his friendship or not. That is basically one of our biggest differences, mainly because I’m a very unforgiving person.

But if I’m really out to learn something in this world, I should start by forgiving because love is, as these wiser people have proved, never about “deserving”.

Isa ended her entry with:

“Love is unfair and I thank God for that. Because the truth is that the only love we were made for in this lifetime is the kind of love we don’t deserve.”

And as I’ve wrote C: isn’t that beautiful, and also true? Although we can never be truly “deserving” of anybody’s love, this doesn’t stop anybody from trying to work so hard and do everything to make themselves feel they deserve love. Any and every kind of love. But the amazing thing is: true love is being able to give and receive love that you don’t deserve. Because there is so much more to love than just “deserving” it. Love has nothing to do with deserving. More than anything, it is the potential for more possibilities, for more beautiful things to come because of loving and being loved. And all these people writing about this kind of love and most especially those who live it — they make me feel hopeful and I think also push me to grow little by little.