Love the People I put in front of you...

Easier said than done.

This is something I feel like God has been saying to me for a while... He's going to have people cross my path, but the consequences are going to be momentous.

The thing is that sometimes people are put into your life only momentarily. You learn something from each other, help each other, but then move out of each other's lives.

Sometimes, on the other hand, people move into your life and it's profoundly changed forever. Sometimes those people become people who will be in your life in some capacity always.

The tricky bit is trying to figure out which people fall into each category.

Is it worth it to fully invest in people you don't know are going to be in your life on a fairly permanent basis? What's the risk? What if...

I have a claddaugh ring that I bought in Galway, Ireland. At the time, I was completely in love with a young man and fairly convinced we would get married. Boy was I wrong. In my innocence and naievty, I bought 2 claddaugh rings, Irish love ring that mean love, loyalty and friendship. I wore my ring in my ring finger so that it showed that I was in love.

The other ring is in a drawer in my flat. It sits in a pretty green box with a clover on the top of it, and I try not to think of it mocking me.

I no longer wear the claddaugh ring to show that I'm in love. I wear it as a promise that my heart is open... I wear it as a promise that I always need to remember that loving people, all people, is important, even if they are hurting you.

The more I think about people, messed up people, community, etc. the more I see that we're all messed up and we all try to hide our messedupness...

"Sometimes you can see what they're trying to hide by try they're trying to hide it"<-- I probably bastardized this quote from "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"... but it's true along with "sometimes people don't do things they want to do because they don't want people to know they want to do them" from "The Village."

To link them together, 1. people are messed up. 2. this causes us to do messed up things that hurt people. 3. If we merely react to the messed upness, much more messed upness will occur. 4. To counteract the messedupness, try to figure out WHY they are doing messed up things. 5. Act with grace and compassion to heal the messed upness.

Donald Miller, in this book "Searching for God knows What" says that in our souls we are all like the children of Chernobyl, but we don't know it. We don't see how deformed and ill, how pained and mutated our souls are. Out of this pain and illness we act, hurting those also mutated people around us.

All I know is that this is bigger than me...