Often I am ruled by my emotions. Completely and utterly. My heart provides me immense joy and passion and it provides me utter despair and pain. The gift of my intelligence and the spark of my personality are often the destructive forces to my sanity.
Commitment is a word used with disdain and a concept that many laugh at especially when it comes to love. I take it so seriously that I lose myself sometimes in putting forth the effort it requires. Part of me is angry that I love so much I give my all and the other part is ashamed to only give some and not all.
I have never been a person that set boundries well. I have always given and given until it hurt.
Then one day I stopped. I started a new phase of my life where I stood for myself alone. I listened to only my own thoughts and opinions and I went and did only what I thought was right. I had no standard but my own and my standard was full of selfishness, pride, immediate gratification, and self satisfaction. Only now do I look back and realize that I built that world of my own for protection from pain, to toughen myself up to the point of not caring, to stop the hurt. Honestly to just be left alone. Lonliness was easier than pain.
Only as I have gotten older, as I have started my relationship with God have I looked into why my innocent young self gave so much to people. Because that is how I was supposed to be. I was built to give, I was built to love, and God gave me strength to survive that love.
Strange I know that I would use the word survive in the same sentence as the word love, but that is sometimes what I do in my relationships with those I love most, I survive.
Love is a risk, not a calculated and thought out risk, a dive in and thrive, throw caution to the wind, commit and don't look back affair. Love is amazing and wonderful but it contains the ability to tear you to pieces. The question is, how do you put yourself back together after it does? By hiding, building a wall, staying away from relationships because they force you to grow, to expand, to build more love?
Or do you suffer and in your suffering become more aware of your capacity to love? Do you look to God and ask him to fill you back up when you are empty? Do you take your feelings about love and set them aside so that you can begin to actually experience love again?
Do you study out love? Do you study the people that you love to love them better? Do you love without regard as to how it is taken or how you may be hurt?
Do you love only those that you deem lovable, or do you push and stretch yourself to love those that you can't stand to be around?
For me love has always been an all in concept. A commitment. Til death do us part not just in marriage but in friendship and family relationships as well. I thought that I was strange to want to love this way, I thought that love being hard was a reflection of my failure and not a reflection of my success. I was wrong.
My ability to continue to be hurt because I want love that is real, and true, and sacred is the love that will carry my through this life. My heart being vulnerable will cause me to struggle endlessly, but it will also allow me to love in ways that I never thought possible and experience joy that does not end. Getting my feelings hurt strengthens me but not in the way that I originally intended, not to be strong and carry on, but to be weak and allow God to carry me on.
The hurt heart of Kris is the best one, because it keeps going along and hurting but learning and growing and expanding in the process allowing it to love more deeply. Those moments of clarity about love and how right it is to keep loving can be few and far between in this world. Praise God this is not the only world I will live in and that this world is not my forever home. This world is where I practice loving so that as I get better and better at it God will fill me with more and more to share and give to others.
Amen for when that day comes. It's closer and closer every moment. I am more and more loved every second. I am less and less scared all the time.
Kris
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