No title.

I don't consider myself to be an insensative person. In fact, I do have a heart for people. I just don't have a whole lot of tolerance for them. If you can wrap your mind around that.

The year is almost over, and one thing that I have learned by personal experience this year is that when God places a love in your heart for someone, no matter what we do, or how hard we try to distract ourselves with other things (or people) in life, it just doesn't go away. And instead of trying to ignore it, we need to find a healthy way to channel that love. A way that is good for the people on both ends of that love, the recipient, as well as our own self.

Forgiveness is a part of love. And until recently, I had absolutely no clue what it really meant to forgive someone. Someone painted the clearest picture for me this year as to what it means to forgive someone. He said, "If every day that you walked into my office, I stepped on your toe, the first couple of times you may let it go. But eventually you would get fed up with it. As a friend, you would probably still come visit, but you would set a boundary as to how close you allow me to get to you. You would have forgiven and released me from the offense, but now our friendship has new boundaries, so that you may protect yourself from getting hurt again." As silly as the story is, it made so much sense to me. I have a particular person in my life that I really needed to forgive, and direction on how to channel the love I have for them. Awesome.

Onnn another note, "you do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest" (Robert Brault). And I believe that everyone's life is an accumulation of the decisions that they have made. (Of course, there are the exceptions of unfortunate situations where people are victimized, but that's not what I am referring to.) I have discovered that you can keep running, running and running... you will eventually exhaust yourself. You're running from a patient God that doesn't tire. And He will keep sitting you down, sitting you down, and sitting you down until you finally can't get back up, and you turn back to Him. Whether He sits your butt down broke, in a bed sick an miserable, alone in life, or in jail, He will sit you down. And it's so sad to me to watch people, whom I care so much about, keep running from that truth and self destruct. And I am a firm believer that everyone needs someone to give a crap about them. I still care, and I always will.  Sometimes, I think that we are afraid of rising up and being all that we can be, what we were destined to be. Because if we become that, when we mess up or if we were to fail, it feels like a much higher fall than if we had just stayed where we were, or at our bottom. Nelson Mandela said it like this, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." Dig it.

"No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and His love is brought to full expression in us." -1 John 4:12

Anyway, to those of you who have made it through this entire entry, and haven't fallen asleep and started drooling on their desks, my apologies for being so all over the place... just a bunch of random thoughts that have been going through my head.