Luis Rojas has spent his life on a journey through pain and success toward understanding the power of love. Now, in his new book The Answer Is Love: A Simple Conversation About Discovering Your True Self, he shares what he has learned during his fifty-plus years on this planet.
Luis takes readers on a roller coaster of the ups and downs he’s experienced, from childhood bed-wetting and childhood abuse, to finding love, becoming a successful criminal and prosecutor attorney, and then losing everything and starting over. . This latter experience led him to a greater understanding of love and ideas that he calls “Messages from the Universe” that he shares throughout the book.
One of my favorite passages from The Answer Is Love is when Luis describes himself as a hummingbird that flies around and over a situation to fully understand it. In the process, he gets to the depths of a situation. This ability helped him greatly in his quest to achieve true justice. As he once told a judge who asked him why the district attorney’s office had agreed to a plea bargain and a lighter sentence for a defendant: “Your Honor, justice is supposed to be fair, and sometimes Showing love and compassion during criminal proceedings is the right thing to do.” to do.”
At the heart of this book are questions about why suffering occurs and its purpose in our lives. Of course, Luis reveals that the answer to these questions is that suffering teaches us to love. For Luis, love is the most important thing on earth, and he is especially aware of what can happen when love is absent in someone’s life. He has seen love in action and can tell you that it is real and it changes lives. In fact, he calls it “the most powerful force on Earth.”
Too often, we focus on everything bad in the world, but Luis knows that that focus is misplaced. He states: “I see the news about violence and hate. It makes me sad, but I can tap into love, knowing that there are millions and millions of acts of kindness around the world every day.” Luis is one of those who commits acts of kindness. These acts need not be grand grand gestures; it can be simple moments of pause and reaction with kindness. A perfect example is how he experienced guilt and shame as a child because he wet the bed. They made him feel that something was wrong with him for not being able to control his bladder. As a father, one night he let his daughter sleep with him. When he wet the bed, he felt fear and shame for his possible reaction, but Luis used love to eradicate any feelings of guilt. His decision to tell her that wetting the bed was no big deal ended a cycle of hereditary grief in the family. Such a small act of kindness was healing for both him and his daughter.
Luis points out that when love is absent from a situation, it is often because we are busy living in the past, bringing up old hurts or grudges, or we are living in the future, focusing on our fear of what is to come. He states: “We vacillate so quickly from the past (what I did that made me so late) to the future (what’s going to happen) that we never stop for a second to live in the now. Love exists in the present and opens the door for positive connections with the Universe and your fellow man”. In other words, when we pause to live in the present, we can find ways to be kind and let love in.
Another favorite passage of mine has to do with a young man Luis let loose after he was caught selling drugs. Luis did not want to ruin the young man’s life, but he hoped that the young man would change the way he was. He states: “I know some may say, ‘It’s wrong that you gave him a pass’ or ‘You should have thrown the book at him.
“The introspective question is: Which book would he have thrown at him? The Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Bull, the Lotus Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, or the Code of Hammurabi? Actually, none of those books raise the philosophical concept of destroying a young man’s future by having two pounds of marijuana in his trunk.On the contrary, these books speak deeply about the importance of respecting the dignity of life, being compassionate and ‘doing for others’ ‘.as you would like them to do with you.'”
I love how Luis twists the definition of “book” here to broaden our perspective of the situation and to remind us that all the world’s religions preach goodness. Later, Luis states: “As a former prosecutor who expelled many people, I can tell you that prison is not a solution. Prison is and always will be an additional problem. Prison has only one purpose: to instill fear, guilt and shame.” in criminals and in those who are imprisoned. It makes you hate yourself and, over time, it makes you hate others. Prison usually does this by removing love from prisoners’ lives.”
Luis is on a mission to invigorate us all with his message of Love and to remind us that we must act from a place of Love. He now realizes that writing this book is his mission. He states, “All the pain from the crashes in my life made me sober up and get back to my true mission, which is helping others. Throughout, I remembered that I was a good person who was here to help others. In the end, I thanked the Universe for my shortcomings, since they were the ones that encouraged me to write this book.”
I hope you’ll join Luis on this mission by taking to heart the words he shares in The Answer Is Love. He has given me a profound reminder of what life is really about and he has made me stop and re-evaluate situations before reacting with fear, worry or anger. We can all pause to find love in any situation, and when we do, life can change.