I’ve come to realize that you can forget Love.

For the first time in a long time, I picked up my guitar tonight and I began to play, and I remembered just how much I love music and how much I love playing guitar. I had forgotten that love. Music draws me. It fuels my creativity. When I was young, I used to hum to myself on the swing set and literally watch as entire story lines unfolded before my eyes, set to my own original score. Music makes me think. It takes me out of myself and takes me to a place where I can perceive the world differently than I normally do in this soundtrack-less world. Sometimes, listening to the lyrics and the melody and the harmony interacting with one another, I realize that the words themselves express my feelings better than I can express them myself. Sometimes I need music for self-realization and self-understanding. And to think, I’ve deprived myself of it for so long. I’ve forgotten that love. I love to sing, and I love to write music. I’m good at neither, but it is a creative means of expression that I adore. When I write words and set them to music, they have a different kind of life and a different kind of meaning than the words that I fashion into poetic stanzas or narrative prose. It means something different when I sing what I’m feeling versus when I just state my feelings. That doesn’t mean my songwriting is any more important than my screenwriting or my prose writing or my poetry. It only means that each has its own unique purpose in my life, and I love it! I can’t believe that I had forgotten that love.

I love to write poetry. I haven’t written poetry in a long time either, and for the first time in a good while, I wrote a poem. Poems are harder for me to write than fiction, mainly because they tend to be more intimate for me. I can just sit down and start writing a story, and something will come out. Not so with poetry. I have to be inspired. Inspiration usually comes from close to my heart, from the parts of me and the parts of my life that I don’t usually reveal to people. My poetry makes me vulnerable, and that is what makes it so hard to write. But I have also learned that sometimes, you have to let yourself be vulnerable if you want to grow. So I write poetry, and I love it. Another love that I had forgotten.

Revelation 2:4 – “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.”

This verse rings true to me in so many ways. I feel like I’ve lost track of so many things over the course of this semester, and reawakening to them in the past day or so has been beautifully refreshing.

Like the sweet, tangy juice of a fresh tangerine ;)

One love I never want to forsake is Jesus. Over this semester, my time with him has vacillated between large amounts of reading his words in scripture and hardly any at all. Lately, I’ve been absolutely fascinated with what Jesus actually says in the gospels – his very words seem both familiar yet foreign. After long periods of not reading scripture, I would return and realize that Jesus sounded like a stranger to me. I never want him to sound like a stranger again. I want to be so familiar with him that whenever I want to know what Jesus would say or how Jesus would act when faced with life’s tough situations, I would already know it.

Like Shane Claiborne discusses in the Irresistible Revolution: I want to be a lover of God.

This is my aim over the next few days, the next few weeks, months, and years of my life. It’s pretty simple. I want to love. Not simple at all really, but worth the effort.