freshman

I wish I could go back to my freshman year for just one day, so I could be friends with people I miss again. I wish I could be friends with the people they were- because the people they have become are so foreign to me and it breaks my heart. I wish that drugs and alcohol had never slipped into their lives and complicated things. I miss laying on warm concrete driveways on hot summer nights, feeling the rain pelt down on my skin as we laughed and talked about how we would never separate and be best friends for always. I want to bottle that innocence like sand in an hourglass and keep it for days like today, so I could give it back to her.

I was reading recently that love, true love is not loving people for who they were or who they can be, but for who they are presently, no matter if they ever change, change shouldn't even be in the lovers vocabulary. As I was thinking about why love tends to have an agenda, I thought that maybe its because we see love as an end point not a journey. We hope to eventually refine that person into someone worthy of our time and emotions, the end result being or twisted version of love. perfection.

Love isn't the end, it isn't perfection. It's wrong choices and hurt and heartache, it's giving and taking and using and learning and abuse, it's tears and hate and smiles, its drifting together and growing apart. Love is ebb and flow. Right now there are lots of situations and relationships where I really don't know what love is supposed to look like, I have been ignored and I have ignored. I have turned a blind eye to things that turned out to be a big deal because I was too bitter to care.

I want to love like my Jesus loved, even when it gets messy, even when I am tired and want to be alone, even when I will get nothing in return. I want a selfless, relentless love.

So as I sit here and think about the who my friends used to be, I can wish all I want that we could go back to the "good old days" and it wont happen, but even if my relationships could be magically restored, I don't know if I would want that, because I would learn nothing about Love, and that is what I really need most of all. I need to learn how to love with no reasons, with no rules, with no dreams of change.