Love Factor (eBook)

Chris DuPre (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
166 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-0377-5 (ISBN)

Examine your mind, engage your heart, and energize your soul to truly embrace The Love Factor and you will discover a deep desire to change the way you love and love the way you change!

Love is the most potent factor in our life-Its presence or absence creates powerful forces that shape our spiritual, emotional, and physical identities. Knowing this important truth, it is imperative that we intentionally ignite every person we encounter with empathy, encouragement, and everlasting empowerment found only within authentic love. Author Chris DuPr intelligently and practically guides people in how to examine the mind, engage the heart, and energize the soul-to change inherent perspectives and challenge the factors that keep us from genuine love in our relationships with God and others!

The Look of Love

Love. We all want it. We all need it. Without it, we are miserable. Is it any wonder why the world passionately pursues all things having to do with love?

Every culture leaves in its wake an image of what life was like—what was important and meaningful within that culture. One of the clearest ways we can see how love is thought of and expressed within our own culture is through TV, music, and movies.

As a young boy, I had my own world with friends, sports, and school, but I knew there was another world out there. I grew up in Upstate New York in a small town about twenty miles east of Rochester. It probably had as many cows as it did people. Cows don’t sing and dance much. Because finances were slim, I was only able to experience the outside world through the lens of our little TV and our fold-down turntable. What I saw through that little lens was larger than life, and in the middle of it all came the same concept over and over. Love found, love enjoyed, new love, old love, love lost, love found again. Love was talked about, sung about, and played out in one scenario after another.

So it is today. Music is still filled with the overriding concept of love. In doing a search of the greatest songs of all time, you can’t help but see that love is the central theme in almost all of them. Even the Beatles didn’t do a song about another subject besides love for almost three years, when they finally put out the song “Nowhere Man” as a single in February 1966.

Looking at the list of the greatest love songs of all time, I am struck by how almost all of them have the same message. They talk about the power of love, letting your loved one know how wonderful she looks tonight, or knowing that someone loves you just the way you are. Song after song describes what every heart longs for: someone who loves me for who I am, and because of that, I finally have someone to love in return.

Think about movie themes over the years. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy doesn’t see the love that surrounds her. She is dreaming of a place over the rainbow where everything is perfect. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and all is right in the world. When, after a fierce storm, she is confronted with that seemingly ideal world, she quickly finds out it’s not everything she thought it would be. There are witches, flying monkeys, and talking trees that slap your hands. That’s nothing like what she grew up with in Kansas!

It doesn’t take long in this new and strange world for her to feel deep within what she really longs for. Family. Home. Love. When all is stripped away, she realizes that Auntie Em’s love is not a limiting love, it’s a nurturing and caring love. In the movie, we don’t know anything about her parents. But if a young girl lives with her aunt and uncle, we can assume that something tragic happened to them and, therefore, to her. With that in mind, it’s no wonder she was looking for something, anything, that could transport her out of her dull and hurting black-and-white world into a world filled with bright colors and all the positive fantasies she could imagine.

In the end love wins out. She must get home, and she is willing to do anything to get there—even take on that witch who wants her dead. When she awakens back in her black-and-white world, nothing there has changed. It’s still black and white, and the same people are there. But one thing is different. She is. Her heart finally sees the affection in the hearts of those who have been by her side for years.

When our hearts are awakened to love,

everything changes.

From there, let’s jump to an old classic that was beautifully brought to the screen by Disney in 1991. Beauty and the Beast is all about love. An arrogant young prince is turned into a beast to teach him humility. And maybe, just maybe, if someone can fall in love with him in that beastly state, he will return to his old self in bodily form, hopefully keeping and growing in his newfound humility.

While watching this with my grandchildren, one of them said to me and my wife, “Hey, Papa and Bella, how was the beast changed back into a handsome prince?” My wife answered sweetly, “Well, honey, she loved his ugly parts away.” After she said that, I looked at her and she looked at me and we both realized the power of those words. Wow! She loved his ugly parts away. That’s the power of love!

From You’ve Got Mail to Casablanca to Wall-E, love is the driving force behind almost all movies. It’s what people fight for, sacrifice all for, and in the end, it’s what saves people.

Some of the most powerful expressions of love have nothing to do with romance. In the last twenty years, there have been scores of movies that deal with the love, or lack thereof, between a father and his son. Gladiator is the story of a special love between a fatherlike figure and a man he welcomes into his life and home as if he were his child. His own son, filled with jealousy, becomes overwhelmed with hatred, and as a result, he is one of the screen’s most all-time hated villains. When love is deeply desired and then rejected, it becomes a powerful weapon.

In the movie Big Fish, a dying father tells the story of his life as his jaded son listens. The young man has heard these stories time and again and is more embarrassed by his father than he is proud of him. But as the story progresses, something happens to the son’s heart. He moves from being detached to finally realizing that the truth of his father’s stories is less important than the heart of the man himself. As his father lies there dying, he has one more chance to love him before it’s too late. He comes to see the man his father really is, and we join him in a good cry as his father’s life, and the movie, come to an end.

Speaking of tears, just try to watch Field of Dreams for the first time (or the fourth or fifth) without shedding a tear. You don’t know for sure how the protagonist’s vision or dreams will be fulfilled or why he has to build a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield. Then, near the end, his father (or his ghost) shows up, and you know. They walk toward each other and end up playing catch. Many men I know always lose it at that moment. A father and son’s love restored means everything.

Even Finding Nemo had me smiling, with a lump in my throat, when the father finally found his son. By the way, if you haven’t seen it, I’m sorry if I just ruined the ending for you. He found Nemo.

While I grew up loving movies, I believe my brother loves them more. The Academy Awards is his Super Bowl night. He graduated from Columbia University with such luminary titles as Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. I, on the other hand, got a $250 scholarship from the Marion Jaycees when I graduated from high school. Oh, well. We all have our own unique giftings.

When my brother was in his senior year of college, he had to write and film his own movie. I was fortunate enough to become one of his esteemed actors. For my part in the movie, I had to walk an imaginary dog on an imaginary leash through the streets of the Upper West Side of New York City. I walked around Broadway and 116th Street, holding a ball, pretending I was walking a dog that wasn’t visible on a leash that didn’t exist. I must say, people all around me thought I was crazy. I guess that’s what made it so much fun. This set my brother and me on a course of talking about, reading about, and enjoying movies throughout our lives. I am grateful for this because I no longer see just the rudimentary story that’s in front of me. I can find intent and purpose, and that has made the whole movie experience much more enjoyable.

What I’ve found has confirmed what I’m saying about love. Movies rarely get made unless love is somehow connected to the message. Even the most horrible fright movies have at their core someone who has been hurt or wounded through love lost, or something that’s connected to it but turns out to be the polar opposite of love: abuse, torment, or debasement. I personally don’t like these kinds of movies, but they weren’t invented out of a vacuum. As they say, hurt people hurt people.

The writer’s quest to pen the great American novel is equivalent to the film maker’s desire to produce the world’s greatest love story. Just look at the response to The Notebook. I remember entering the theater wondering if this was going to be just another chick flick. Of course, being the father of three girls, I have seen almost every chick flick ever made.

As the movie progressed, I realized who the characters were from the two stories that unfolded before me. In spite of what I knew was coming, I still found myself caught up in the emotion of a young couple’s growing love and an older couple’s ability, or inability, to communicate that deep love once again. When it ended I was ruined. I sat there with tears pouring down my face and didn’t move. I couldn’t move. The woman on the other side of my wife (who was also crying) looked over at me, smiled, and said, “It’s good to see a man with a heart.” My response was “You’d have to be dead to not respond to that.”

Isn’t that the point? None of us wants to walk around with a...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	17.5.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Partnerschaft / Sexualität
ISBN-13	979-8-3509-0377-5 / 9798350903775

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