Love is simple and easy, or rather that is the way it seems. Love is actually very complicated. Like a delicate flowering plant, love requires special actions and attentions to keep it alive and even better to help it grow.

All plants need water, light and food to survive. While three ingredients would seemingly make an easy recipe to help a plant survive, too much or too little of any one can kill a plant. To help a plant flower and grow requires even more care. There are many summers when the Texas fields that are normally covered in Bluebonnets are mostly barren of the State Flower.

Yet the soil feeds the plants. You can tell from the green grass around that there has been rain, and there is almost always sun in Tejas. So what else makes the Bluebonnets grow and flower?

Texas Bluebonnets

It is a special combination of the elements that makes them fill the fields full of blue splendor.  In this same manner love that nourishes the soul requires a special blend of elements. Yet we very often leave out certain ingredients never mind taking the time to blending them.

Love requires more than just the words “I love you.” While words help, actions that express the feeling are necessary for the words to mean anything. Love also requires nurturing and attention, continual actions and words to keep it alive. Doing one or two things then leaving love alone won’t promote the long-term growth of love. So actions, words and attention help love to grow, but what really brings it home is sharing love.

Plants have seeds that spread and create more plants. Learning to love yourself creates seeds, while sharing that love with others spreads those seeds of love. While not all the seeds may germinate, there will be some that grow and spread more love… and that is why this blog is here.

Love,
MJ Schrader

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Things do not always happen as planned.  If you have read the About you know that I wanted to be a writer at age 5, yet over 30 years have passed since that time.  Even as I decide what to write, things changed.

The title to this mission, this eventual book, was easy. The quote was heard on the radio and in etched itself on my soul.  The content was then easy to realize, but how to start telling this story long evaded me.

Until I had a conversation with a dear friend.  He wrote a story called Jumping Mouse, and loves to tell Indian stories.  His wisdom was to start with something simpler.  Start from the point I was still struggled with, which was learning to love myself.

Thus 101 Ways to Love Yourself was born.  In his wisdom, he asked that I create a list and fill the book with many blank pages.  His logic was simple, pure and beautiful.  Yet as someone who had come from an emotional blackhole, and knowing others who had been abused, emotionally and physically, I knew a list would be way too simple of a read.

My friends would read the list quickly, easily, say yes, no, maybe on each item, mentally checking them.  Yet they would not take time to absorb each way.   If a way didn’t seem like it would help, they would simply say that’s too complicated, won’t help me or something else rather than look from another point of view.

So the first book in this series of “More Valuable Than Bread“ is about loving yourself.   Next week there will be more story about why loving yourself is so important.

Love,
MJ Schrader

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Welcome to More Valuable Than Bread.

What we all seek is more valuable than bread, even if you were starving there is one thing of greater value.  It was so important that there are two related quotes accredited to Mother Theresa.

“There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.”

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

This is the true spirit of this blog to spread stories of love and hope, beauty and peace.  All these things come from inside ourselves; yet years of punishment, regrets, self-defeat have tarnished the beauty we have inside.  The tarnish also blocks us from sharing our original beauty with others, and dampens our true spirit.

Love,
MJ

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