Above All Things, I Believe in Love

Unconditional love is not questioned or understood, its just there for the taking.

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." – C.S. Lewis

“I’d rather spend one minute holding you than the rest of my life knowing I never could.” – Bubble Boy

“You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.” – Henry Drummond

G. K. Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Barbara DeAngelis
You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.

~ David Grayson

We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.  ~Author Unknown

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.  ~From the movie Annie

To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven....Karen Sunde

All, everything that I understand, I understand
only because I love....Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy.

To love and win is the best thing.
To love and lose, the next best....William M. Thackeray.

Real love begins where nothing is
expected in return....Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

To live is like to love - all reason is against it,
and all healthy instinct for it....Samuel Butler

When you love you should not say, "God is in my
heart" but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love,
for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course....Unknown

Our love must not be a thing of words and fine talk.
It must be a thing of action and sincerity....I John 3:18.

There is no remedy for love but to love more....Thoreau.

Pure love is matchless in majesty; it has no parallel in power
and there is no darkness it cannot dispel....Meher Baba

True love is the unearned compliment,
the gift forever giving....Burke Day

To love someone means to see him as
God intended him....Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

You love simply because you
cannot help it....Kim Anderson

When you have nothing left but love, then for the first
time you become aware that love is enough....Unknown

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that
you care for to be what they choose for themselves,
without any insistence that they satisfy you....Wayne Dyer

To love another person is to see the face of God....Victor Hugo

I love you. And not in a friendly way, although I think
we're great friends. And not in a misplaced affection,
puppy-dog way, although I'm sure that's what you'll call it.
And it's not because you're unattainable. I love you.
Very simply, very truly. You're the epitome of every attribute
and quality I've ever looked for in another person...."Chasing Amy."

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the
gift of unconditional love and acceptance....Brian Tracy

Love is the strongest force the world possesses,
and yet it is the humblest imaginable....Mahatma Gandhi

I have a thought...the one God has meant for us is going to
be the hardest to get, the hardest to keep, and the hardest
to accept. Because through all that, love will grow stronger,
bonds will become thicker, and the future will become more
clear. Love wasn't made to be easy, otherwise, we wouldn't
end up with the RIGHT person, we would end up with the first
one who came along. By struggling, we single out the wrong
ones and realize who really is the ONE....J.D.

Whom we love best, to them we can say least....English proverb

“The thing about completely giving your heart over to God is that the decision to love no longer belongs to you; you are giving up control over who your heart is entrusted to. But unlike you, God would never let the wrong person hold your heart.” - Me

<3

Letters From God

Today was our last FIREstarters retreat of the semester; my last retreat. I was EXHAUSTED, but still managed to drag myself out of bed at 6:45am for a fun-filled day in campus ministry with Catholic high school confirmation students. It was a beautiful, challenging, wonderfully-terrifying day, and I think my life was changed once again by a few simple moments.


First of all, I'll have you know that at every single retreat so far (5 of them), the kids in my small group will ask me and the other small group leaders what our confirmation names are. My response to that question is always, "Well...I'm Protestant...so I don't have one."


Well, today, at my sixth and final retreat, I decided to find a saint that I could use as my Protestant-equivalent of a confirmation name. The very first time I heard the name Saint Therese I found it aesthetically pleasing and was quite intrigued. At lunch while I talked about finding myself a saint, Therese was the very saint suggested to me by a fellow FIREstarter.


Born in 1873, Therese lived in France as a nun for 10 years before her death at the age of 24. She was never able to complete any great works of service or do anything outside of her Carmelite cloister, for that matter. She was overly sensitive and cried A LOT. Now, at first, I was thinking, "I don't like her very much - she sounds like a total sap and I'm definitelyyyy not as much like her as I thought." How ridiculous of me. I'm the girl who has always felt sick to her stomach when anyone yells at her, if anyone rejects her, if any negativity is directed her way. And, yes, I do cry easily, although when alone. As for not being able to serve others, as I read on I began to get a better understanding of that part of Therese's life.


Therese forced her way into the Carmelite order by confronting the Pope and demanding to be let in despite her age. Her persistence impressed the Vicar General, and she was admitted. As a nun, she suffered through painful life situations and struggled to pray her way through, at times. What I like about her "service" is what she called "scattering little flowers," or taking every little opportunity she could to make some sacrifice for others. Because of this, she was called the Little Flower.


Here is a quote by Saint Therese that I particularly enjoy:


Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was burning with love. I understood that Love comprised all vocations, that Love was everything, that it embraced all times and places...in a word, that it was eternal! Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love...my vocation, at last I have found it...My vocation is Love!"


I make my mission statement again and again, and here I will say it once more - I just want as many opportunities as possible to show others that they are loved.
What better saint could I pick?


Now, on to the rest of the retreat. It was in the middle of one of our skits that I realized how significant it was that this was my last retreat (In this skit I play a demon and was at the time standing with my head bowed after Jesus had "vanquished" me). You know those moments you look back on in life that are so bittersweet because you know some great chapter of your life that you have once experienced is now over and done with, forever to be trapped in your memory? For me, right now, that memory is summer camp, and a second chapter is winter percussion in high school. I am about to add another chapter to that book - FIREstarters, and, actually, Saint Francis overall. Crazy, to think that just today I was participating in the memory that will soon be completely in the past.


Finally, I got an amazing letter from God last week. We have a time at the retreat in which we give everyone a sheet of paper and ask them to write a letter to God, then write a response to that letter "from God." This week wasn't as monumental, but last week's definitely did not come from my own mind. Here it is:


Bethany, my darling child,
Quiet your soul and rest in Me. The love I have for you is so great, Bethany. Why are you looking for more validation than what I’ve already given you? Let that be enough. You are forgiven; you are purified; you are My beloved. Give your heart to me again and you will never be left wanting. And remember, I am with you always, until the end of the age, every step of the way. Change is a good thing; invite it and allow me to smooth out all the rough edges. You have such great opportunity – I am giving you open doors and all you have to do now is walk through them. You make the decision with what I have given you. I have called you and I have equipped you; now it is time to put that call to action. It’s okay to be scared – but find peace in Me. Let me heal your brokenness and fill any void in your life. I will not forsake you – remember that. And Bethany, I will give you the desires of your heart. This, too, shall pass. This hurt will not last forever. So stop worrying and place all of your cares in my hands. They will be taken care of. I am your sustenance. Do not lose faith in the fact. I love you, My sweetheart, My joy. Have peace.


Now I'm still exhausted from my day, so I may nap. I have so much work to do. Oy. 
<3

My life as told by Elizabeth Gilbert

Tonight, after watching the movie Eat, Pray, Love for the second time with my FIREstarters girls, I referred back to a Facebook note I wrote a while back about the quotes from that movie that really related to my life. Then, seeing the new way it impacted me this evening, I added some more quotes to sum up my life at this point. And, still, I believe that I have been channeling Elizabeth Gilbert's writing through my entire life's journey - not the exotic, Rome/India/Bali-exploring parts, but the philosophical at the very least. So here are a few of the quotes:            

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."

"Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance."

"Real, sane, mature love - the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school - is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect."

"I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises."

"Faith is a way of saying 'Yes, I preaccept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.'"
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"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."

"If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will protect upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

"It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to be complicated. And love is always complicated. But humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

"Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing..." 

Oh, look, coffee. How perfect! <3