to love.

I've thought of about a hundred different titles and directions I could go, with this first post of 2013.

I felt pressure to come up with a grand post about our lovely holiday and all of my many resolutions for the New Year.  This 2013 year, that we have already begun {?!!}

The more I thought about it, the more my mind kept turning back to only one thing.

Love.

"Just love".

I feel as though the steam engine that I have observed myself {and many others} to have boarded, in the past years, is slowing and we are all jumping off.  Maybe it's simply because myself and those around me are all aging and with age comes wisdom {or so I'm hoping}.  We are realizing that living and loving are the best things and the things which everything else is born from.
Purpose derived from love looks wildly different than purpose derived from self.

Imagine if I {and possibly you} only had one resolution and that was to LOVE.

Not so much, "Love you, BFF!  You're awesome!  Let's get appetizers and talk!"

Not like that but like really LOVED all that is around you and within you and for you.
I would like to do that and do it without reservation and without agenda and without resentment but it's really hard for me.  I want to withhold at times {nasty habit of mine} because others don't give it to me and I'm a faulty creature, I know.  Sometimes I want to not love because it is hard when I feel it is wasted and unobserved.  I want to ignore the love that others need because it causes me heartache or moments of time or minor/major inconveniences.  I want to stop loving if someone shows me no love. 
Do you see the problem with all of those statements?  I do.
They all start with "I".  Loving has so little to do with me.  It has to do with extending it to others.

Really, I want to love this year.
And not just because it's January 1 because really....today is  just another day.  Another new year begins tomorrow morning and the morning after that and the morning after that.  It's always a new set of 365.  Today isn't the hugest deal, really.

I want to love because when I love, like Christ loved, unabashedly and without barrier.....I am the most happy.  This last year was a happy year beausse I gave up on loving things that are unimportant and self serving and pressed into loving people, purposes and ideas.

People that are around me.
Purposes that are changing the world.  And purposes that are changing small places within it.
Ideas that are ignored but shine the light of Christ.

I don't have lists of resolutions this year and I want to take each day as it comes.
Morning by morning and day by day I want peace and kindness and love.

I do know that each day I want LOVE in it.  If I love everyone around me, the way the Lord asks me to, I'm pretty sure that I will look back with satisfaction and gratitude, on December 31st, 2013, no matter what comes my way.