overflow of love || life

"Sorry I've been so busy." It's a common reason for being unable to catch up with someone, spend time with people you love and do what you really care about. We work, we study, we have meetings to go to, we have to clean, take care of kids, we're starting businesses, we're beginning a new career and whatever else we're busy doing  -- we're doing it. When I'm busy I become lazy and complacent. I become quite robotic and drained. I don't want to be around anybody or do anything. I think I've become busy with the wrong things though.

"It's just not my personality." "It's not the way I do things." I know I've said this quite often when I don't want to do something or when I've been confronted about the way I do or don't do things. My old habits, personality and temperament are good excuses for me to use when I want to reason my way out of something. If I don't want to spend time with people, I tell them I'm an introvert. If I offend someone with my words, I tell them I like to say what I want to say. If I don't respond right away to an e-mail or text, I tell them I'm just slow at it. It's excuse after excuse rather than owning up anything.

Yesterday I was driving and it dawned on me that I still don't know what it means to truly love people. My love for my family and friends is weak. I have a limit and then I want to quit. It's much easier to talk about love than to actually have it manifest in every area of my life. Just like it's much easier to talk about faith than to live by it. It isn't that I'm being hard on myself, but I know that my love isn't enough. It runs dry and it has it's limits.

Do I do everything out of love? Has love completely changed me from the inside out? The times I'm tired or burnt out isn't because I've loved so much but because I haven't. Loving others shouldn't be draining or tiring; not when you know you're loved and not when you know who you are and what you were made to do. We were made to love and for love. Only when we lose sight of this do we become tired, selfish and unable to love. If I'm fully loved then there should be an abundance of it within me. When that fullness of love is in me it should overflow to others around me. When I lose sight of the good love I have in my life, I can't love others. I become like an empty cup trying to quench the thirst of others. It's counterproductive and useless. You might as well not even do it. Your cup needs to be FULL and supernaturally always full in order for you to give it away.

I've become so discouraged by my own ability to love. I've become so discouraged by other people's inability to love. I have high expectations when it comes to love because it is the most important thing we have in this life. We want to get things right and be right but we forget to love. We allow our ego and arrogance get in the way. But I want to see people overflowing with love; not talks of love and not blog entries of love, but actual love. I want to see it move powerfully in me and in people around me where lives are completely changed, flipped upside down and we're left changed with encounters of love through each other. I've become busy with the wrong things; things that don't matter in the end. I want to be busy loving and growing in that love. I want my personality to be shaped by love, not by old habits, reactions to the past and old wounds.

"Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him." C.S Lewis