Love.

I just feel like I need to chronicle this awesome journey of love that God has taken me on...

After Nathan died, I felt this overwhelming urge to, like Nate, tell people about Jesus. I wanted to be outgoing and loving and caring and compassionate for lost people. For all people. I wanted to be an outspoken, loving Christian! Somewhere in all of this, I realized the person that I had become. An unraveling self that spent my days pretending to love and pretending to care and pretending to tell lost people about Jesus. I would see people I knew and--remembering awesome Nathan's example--I would rush to them, "excited" to see them. I would ask them how their week was, how their relationship with Jesus was, all the while pretending to listen and pretending to care while harboring my own selfish agenda. After these interactions, it was as if I asked myself, "Well, was I nice enough? Was I kind enough to him? I hope he likes me..."

See, I wanted nice things said about me. Actually--great things! I wanted people to talk about my faith and my witness and my care of others. Kinda like they did with Nathan. It was all about me.

CS Lewis wrote:
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;
I talk of love--a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Just like that scholar's parrot didn't really know Greek, I don't think that I can really know love. At the core, we as humans are such miserable, helpless, selfish, rotten people, left on earth to plunder and pillage others for our own sakes. So, when people wonder what's wrong with the world, I want to, like Miller, raise up a sign that says I AM THE PROBLEM! It's us!

When we start being SELFLESS, even if its just for a little while, five minutes (which is about five more minutes than we normally give to others), one conversation, we start realizing that God calls us to love in this way. That's what I wanted that Nathan had! It wasn't that he was hyped up on Red Bulls and he was energetic and excited to see people...he really CARED about people! This gets harder and harder the more you think about it, though...I'm to love smelly homeless people? Yep. I'm to go out of my way to talk to that mentally retarted person at school? You got it. And what about that girl that thinks she's better than me? Surely I am exempt from loving her...No way.

God is so big and mighty and clean and bright that we can't even begin to wrap our minds around the thought. From childhood, I have been hearing that God sent his Son to die so that we could have forgiveness of sins and eternal life. But that phrase in itself becomes so commonplace and so cliche, we forget its unbelievable, supernatural power! HERE's what we should be teaching in our churches, in our schools: God, who is completely in love with us, came from his throne in Heaven to this selfish world (that's you and me, by the way) and died a gory, brutal death. He did all of this because He is infinitely in love with us; In love in a way that--to steal a line from my favorite band, As Cities Burn--is lost in second chances WITHOUT END! Husbands and wives say that the are "in love", but can we really ever know romance like this?