LOVE IS...

I guess it's a new day. The end of a chapter in my life. I thought the chapter would have been filled with more highs than lows, but we try to love and in the end, all we can do is walk away with another harsh lesson in love. Sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes, it just isn't the right person. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to communicate with someone, they don't want to hear it, and rather just prove how much love can really hurt. Healing from scars that wounds so deep... not based on the time you spent trying to get to know someone, but more on the words that cut you so deep, like a knife. Those wounds are the ones that will show a scar.

I didn't want to blog yesterday because it would have been filled with undue pain. I wanted a day to clear my head and just pray for him, and for me. I still think the tickets are his. I don't know how that will happen. But I will still keep my promise. I never lied, and I never meant to hurt him, despite his cruelty.

Anyways, I figured I would just share something here, that defines real love. If you ever saw the movie with Mandy Moore, A Walk to Remember, you will see Landon reading from a book, the chapter on love. It comes in simple English from the book of I Corinthians, Chapter 13. I hope you like it... and I hope it permeates your whole being. This is what I desire above all else. A love like this.

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.

If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing.

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for evil.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end, understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us.

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

This was from the Message//REMIX version. I think it is a really easy to understand translation with a powerful punch of contemporary insight.