Joy Farrington shares what love looks like on the streets of Pasadena

Joy Attmore

Sat in a coffee shop in LA, pondering on life with its beauty and brokenness, I was struck by this phrase, 'by your eyes'. It stood out to me as I was indulging in reading some of the Bible, desiring to fill my mind with something a little more meaty and satisfying than a magazine; hungry for some fresh insight into life.

By our eyes so much is revealed; whether beautiful or broken these windows to our soul give great insight to our hearts, often giving away what we try so hard with our mouths to hide. As well as our eyes revealing the true state of our hearts, it is also by them that we are fed.

If we feed our eyes on love, on things of beauty and purity, our hearts will slowly and constantly be filled with the golden drops of love. We must remain captivated by love.

Over the past couple of months I have realised that my heart has felt out of love; I think this has been my problem. My vision became distracted by other things; working, achieving, people pleasing and ticking all the right boxes. My heart became fed by things that hold no lasting life; things that set me on a measuring scale of worthiness rather than simply saying 'you are worthy'. Period.

We can often talk about love as this flimsy, cheesy emotion, reducing it to a Hallmark card. It also gets confused with lust, filling our vision with a potent poison that we let seep down into our hearts; but love is powerful. Love is world changing and we were never created to operate without it.

On Friday June 7th I was sat with some friends playing cards when we found out about the shooting spree that occurred in Santa Monica. The four of us began to pray as the shocking news sunk in. We were all deeply moved by the news that we were hearing and our response as a group was a desire to see a change in this pattern of violence and anger that all too regularly seems to occur around the world.

What if love became our vision? What if we actually looked people in the eyes and told them that we loved them before saying anything else? This idea of the transformational power of love began to take over us. One by one we began looking each other in the eyes and saying 'I love you' over and over again. It wasn't 'I love you because...' it was just simply 'I love you' until both of our visions were completely captivated by love.

Before long it was no longer possible to keep the amount of love that we were feeling amongst just the four of us and we decided to take it outside; to speak love into the vision of Pasadena, CA. Every person that we passed got told that we loved them, from club bouncers to intertwined couples. Some people looked confused and wary at first so we carried on speaking love over them until their vision transformed. We literally watched love pour itself out over the streets of Old Town Pasadena with such freedom and beauty.

Whilst waiting to cross the road I turned to a lady who was stood next to me and told her that I loved her. She was soon being told over and over again how much she was loved by the four of us and how we thought she was absolutely amazing. Her expression was one of bewilderment at first and then love began to sink in. We invited her to come and eat with us and soon we were joined by Grace and two of her friends. It turns out that Grace is a prostitute; one of her friends was her pimp and the other a homeless man.

We didn't go out onto the streets of Old Town with an agenda; we just wanted to show people love. It was love who connected us with three people who really needed to know what love looks like. Grace, Sean and Jerry have become our friends now and they have been shown that this is what love looks like.

By our eyes our hearts are filled so let our vision feast on love!