One of things I am most thankful for every year, one of my greatest blessings is my supporting and loving circle of close family, friends, and mentors. They are profoundly encouraging, deeply and life-changingly loving and compassionate. Thee are the people I trust deeply, and share the fully glory of my awkward and embarrassing moments. They get the raw unedited version of me, the highlights and the low lows. I am beyond blessed and challenged by their love and support.

"Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart, one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them."

This is perhaps one of my all time favorite quotes. I have seen this play out more and more in my life in the people who surround me. This is the at the heart of all I strive to be. I want everything that I do to marked with intention and compassion, to be someone who leaves better than I found them.

It's all too easy to go through life and accumulate baggage from our relationships. Family members let us down and fail to set aside their personal issues to come along aside and support us. Churches are inundated with chaos, conflict and pain and leave us damaged and disillusioned by their rejection and their incapability to live out the teachings of Jesus. Friendships crack and crumble over the conflict of life and harsh words out of anger. We will enviably encounter the prior hurts and past baggage of someone else, and it can damage us. It's hard to experience the brokenness of life and not acquire more than a few trust issues when it comes to our relationships. We fill the hole left by our past hurts by being busy, and by chasing success and accomplishments. We think that our abilities and gifts will not fail us like people have, and we sacrifice our current relationships too often to get ahead.

It's can be easy to be become me-centric to focus on the damage and hurt that have happened to me, and to focus on what's best for me and my success. The focus of a self first mentality can become a viscous circle as we encounter the darkness of others and become more damaged, and pass on that hurt to someone else. It's easy to be ignorant of that, and as we live life, the mentality of doing what's only best for me can be deeply entrenched within us. We can navigate the rocky seas of life guarded, damaged, and ignorant of the fires we start in the lives of those around us. We can become afraid to lose, afraid to be vulnerable and open, and afraid to show any signs of weakness. And yet this may be the least healthy way to cope with our baggage and pain, in guarding and defending our hearts from anyone who might wound them, it will cost us to forfeit the capacity to love others.

C.S. Lewis writes in the Four Loves,

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The unbreakable, impenetrable, cold heart does sound like a meaningful life, a life lived to the fullest. So let's not go that route. As uncomfortable and albeit painful at times, let's you and I chose to love others whole-heartedly with abandon. Let us choose to forgive. Let us choose to invest in others. Friendship may not have any survival value, but it makes the brokenness of our lives have value.

Let us choose to forgive for us, and for them. Live life without our armor on, and our defenses up. Let us choose to approach our relationships without fear, insecurity and without the need to control and predict. Live days marked with compassion and concern.

So let's be willing to lose, to abandon the mindset of competition, fear and insecurity. Let's be willing to love people even when it cost us something, because we are loved by someone who let it cost Him everything. I have to admit I am far from perfect at this. Ask any of my friends and family, more often then I would like I am a mess of defense mechanisms, insecurities and the disease to please, but I am trying to love others better because my definition of love stems from a man who gave up his entire life to love, die for and save the very people who rejected Him.

So let us love others.

Let us drop our walls and guard us hearts by abandoning them to Jesus.

Let us leave people better than we found them, less damaged and more trusting.

Let us live love out in everyday, in all that we do.