Love

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not boastful or proud.

We all know these words like our Mama's cooking. How many of us really live it out? I know I don't. There are some people in my life I dislike to such a degree that it literally poisons my soul and keeps my heart locked up with anger and misunderstanding.

Freedom of the heart comes when you forgive people who have wronged you, ask forgiveness from those you've wronged and stop being pissed at people who didn't ask your forgiveness when they should have. How can we give our hearts to someone else if it's not free from the confines of our own misunderstanding and bitterness?

I have learned if I do not give freely of my heart and hold a person to my ideals and standards, it will never be more than a moment of selfishness that eventually blossoms into spite. While no one is me, they are are not no one. I cannot hold others down to what I think they should be.

I am learning through myself, my dear friends and my mistakes that love is not ever going to be what we seek it to be. Love is what happens when we stop trying to control it. It's a force that pulls us together when we think our hearts have been emptied. But it's when we're empty that we can be open to be filled up with something new.

My love and strength are renewed when I think I've been broken because it's then I recognize the people in my life who fill the holes people have made in my heart. Love is not what we make of it but what it makes of us. It's the friends we make who become family and lovers who become friends.

Let's hold each other close. Love one another like it's the last time we'll ever love and bring in each new day with passion and joy. Doing or giving less is robbing yourself and those around you of a potential last second, moment, hour, day, week, month or year of fulfillment. We have to stop being each other's own worst enemy.