All you nice and big children: Remember that mother and father need your love! Love them—and tell them that you do! You can tell them in a number of ways, and it will be rewarded, for in love there is a world of joy.
Love me—and tell me so! O, love me just a little bit!
I have read that prayer in the eyes of a wife: Her husband was a man in whom she surely could take delight. He was efficient; everybody admired him, women especially, and he seemed to like everybody. Indeed, she could be proud of such a husband! There were plenty of women who envied her and wished themselves in her place. And—how beautifully he could speak of domestic love—women were deeply touched, and their eyes moistened when he did so. O, if they only had such a husband—but such a one had not fallen to their lot!
He had plenty of smiles and kind words and love for everybody else—only not for his wife who sat at home. Hard-hearted, frigid and haughty he passed her by when she sat with the baby on her knee, with despair penetrating all her features, and the one prayer was flaming in her eye: O, love me just a little bit—just a little bit, O, please do!
Love me—and tell me so! O, love me just a little bit! That has been written in the eye of ever so many poor and forlorn human beings—especially among those who seemed to have become sadly superfluous in the busy life of the world. Now and then I have heard just such people say, with a strange mingling of wistfulness and joy vibrating in their voice: To think that the minister would call upon me! Nobody else ever comes here. Nobody cares about me any more!
Thus many a man or woman has been placed in that miserable kind of solitude in the midst of throbbing life. Nobody cares about me. Love me—and tell me so! O, love me just a little bit, please! That's the cry from the depth of their hearts, but it is uttered as though in some limitless desert: No answering sound is heard—there is no sign that anyone cares for them. This is heartrending.
Yes, that is true. But if these lines of mine might reach some such poor soul, then I would say: It isn't quite as bad as this. Let your yearning for love soar upward to that God who listens to the sighs of the heart of dust, and then you will hear the response: I love you—and I tell you that I do. I have told you so through my only begotten Son: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
This has been said to mankind plainly enough. And these plain words are not merely written in the leaves of the Book of Books. They are inscribed in the very life of mankind with the blood of the only begotten Son.
Such words are not merely for the happy world surrounding you. It means you—just exactly you who are yearning for love: For your sake these words have been spoken.
But we who are more fortunately situated—we who enjoy the love of God and of our fellow-beings, and who, in return, love those in our homes, in our circle of acquaintances and in the church—let us tell one another about it in a good and nice way. So much joy of love is lost—just because it finds no expression. For this reason so many gradually come to doubt that they really are being loved.