Miscellaneous on Caleb's Personal Writings

Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Love

A blurb I wrote on love a long time ago. Love is such a term that is tossed about with no true understanding of what it truly is. Love has many different attributes that cover a wide range of issues and ways of living. But, in order to keep this somewhat brief, love is the end-all solution to problems. Love can cover over the discrepancies and faults of others while supporting and saving those who are broken and defeated. The more I study love, the more I realize that it governs the way that we approach every situation, whether it be a healthy love or not. Our actions are completely governed by how we choose to express our love to others, how we choose to put others before ourselves in love or choose not to. The fact is, love can dramatically change every single aspect of your life as long as you just let it into your heart and allow it to change you. I’ve had so many people ask me why I’m willing to buy a drink or some food for people, why I don’t care whether or not people pay me back. That’s just one way I can show love, I can give of my own resources and sacrifice something of myself to help someone else. That’s such a foreign concept in this culture, and it’s almost offensive to not accept reparations for paying for someone else. This continues to astonish me each time, that I choose to do something out of my own heart, while I expect absolutely nothing in return, but that’s a bad thing. Its frowned upon to give and expect nothing in return, because people expect that you secretly are manipulating them into getting something far bigger/worse. This idea that giving with absolutely no end goal in mind except to make a person’s day or to help someone less fortunate than yourself, it’s completely alien. Giving to charities is acceptable, because there’s a preconceived notion that the contribution is going somewhere meaningful, that it is helping someone out. But do it in your own backyard, to your friends or people you come into contact with on a regular basis, and it’s all the sudden taboo. But they fail to see the power that something that small can really do to a person. It can make a depressed and potentially suicidal teenager all the sudden rethink their life and realize that there are people out there who love them, who care enough to go out of their way to give them something for free. I feel this is my calling, not that helping overseas or in poverty-stricken areas is not important, by all means, it’s incredibly important, but there also needs to be a shepherd to stay behind and take care of the flock that’s already in the fold. I see the love that I give out to people fall on deaf ears, to those who are willfully ignorant. But my job is to merely plant the seed and let God grow the fruit, so that’s all I can do, is spread the seed as far as I can and pray that fruit will grow. I suppose my goal is that each day, I do something nice for someone that is to show that person love, plain and simple. These actions do not have to require money or giving something physical to a person, but it could be a simple smile, listening as they talk to you, maybe just a hug as you pass by. These little actions could completely change the course of a person’s day, it could be the saving action that they’ve been longing for such a long time. How could I possibly refuse an opportunity to show love to others and at the same time preach the Good News? I find myself almost depressed with how much showing love is completely thought of in such a bad way. I ask people why it’s such a bad thing that I give of myself, and they never have an answer or one that is so bogus that it isn’t even worth mentioning. I believe that every time you take something, whether it be time, money, or any other resource, and spend it on someone else instead of taking that same opportunity to satisfy yourself, you end up fulfilling what you were looking for in the first place, but at the same time, you have dramatically altered that person; you begin to make that person think about why you would take something that you could easily spend on yourself, but instead you chose to spend it on someone else, to give freely without thinking about what you could possibly gain from such an action. That’s how I want to live my life, I want to live in such a way that people wonder how I could possibly spend so much of my life giving and never wanting for myself, but those people will never realize that I take so much more from the giving to others than I ever could from spending upon myself. When I spend these things on myself, the joy lasts for a moment, the pain subsides for an instant; but when I decide that someone else is in more need or that someone else could benefit more from this gift, the joy sticks around, the pain subsides and then dissipates. I never feel more alive than when I give of myself to someone else, when I take something of myself and give it freely to someone. That’s probably why I’m so bad at relationships, I don’t do a good job of not loving to the fullest extent that I can. When I fall for someone, its either all the way or not at all. There is no inbetween, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t find that middle ground. And maybe I really don’t want to. High school relationships are the most annoying, passive, and ultimately pointless things that I have ever come into contact with. True, some of those last throughout life, and that’s fantastic. But overall, they do absolutely no good except to break your heart multiple times and teach you how to give less of your heart each time. Each time my heart gets broken, I give less each new time I get the chance, and I hesitate longer each time to fully put myself out there for a person to understand. This feeling of rejection is too overwhelming for me to experience time and time again. I hate the feeling, it sickens me and puts me into a state of depression that is nigh impossible for me to get out of. I want to love someone as much as I possibly can, that’s all I know how to do, and in high school, no one’s ready for that. No one wants to be loved so that they feel overpowered by it, they want something way more casual and “fun”. For me, there’s nothing in this world that would be more “fun” or exhilarating than to finally experience that kind of love from another person. But I know it’ll have to wait, because I’m not compromising on someone that I could get a little from and be half-satisfied with myself. I’m waiting until I find someone who will see me, with all the love that I offer and that I will continue to bring, and find that I’m exactly what they’ve been wanting, so in turn they bring out all the love that they have and give it to me, and I find that it’s what I’ve been waiting for my whole life. And in that realizing moment, fireworks will go off in my heart as I begin to understand what this unrequited love has been like; I will finally get a chance to experience something as close as I will ever find on this earth to how God loves me. I simply can’t wait for this time, and it’s worth waiting a thousand years to find. I will wait and try to find this love, for I would rather have night after night of tears and heartache for the one that turned out to not be right, only to eventually find the one that fits the puzzle in my heart perfectly, than to never even try to find that person and live my life with a gap that I know will never be filled. I know that God will always fill my heart completely and that He will always be there for me, but to be able to see that kind of love (as close as is humanly possible) in someone else, and for that love to be directed at me, there are few things that I long for more on this earth.

Post College Musings

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Post College Musings

I wrote this to myself right as I was graduating college. How interesting to see yourself in your early 20s speak to their future, with optimism unearned and yet earnest.

Reading back through all of this material, through the thoughts I’ve had throughout high school and throughout college, now that I’m standing on the cusp of graduating college, and long removed from many of the sentiments that have dotted my mind over the past 7 or 8 years, I can see how much pain I was in and how lost I was. While speaking truth about love and how that looks (thanks be to God for those insights and for placing me on that path of truth, for it has defined my life and kept me from falling into the void that surrounded me), I could not see how I did not love myself. I fooled myself into thinking that, if I loved enough and if I gave enough of myself away, I could erase the need to love myself. I’m not sure how conscious this even was, because the knowledge of how much disdain I held for myself didn’t surface until I learned what joy truly was. My body had turned off the capacity for feelings for so long that, when I first felt what joy really was, I almost went into shock. It broke me down, because it was like regaining a sense I didn’t even know I had lost. The real emotions that flooded me couldn’t be stopped, and I didn’t know how to handle all of these coming in all at once, but while this was hard, it was truly one of the most amazing things that has ever happened to me. I felt like a complete person, and because of this catalyst, I was able to figure out so many of the issues that had surrounded me, chiefly being that fact that I didn’t like myself. This revelation hit me like a tsunami, because when I was able to look at myself and say that I actually liked the way I looked, my brain hit me with the massive realization that I had never actually said that about myself, that the thought that I enjoyed how I looked was completely foreign to me. It shook me to my core once again, and from this knowledge, I have now built myself up to be someone who cares much more deeply and much more genuinely, for I have learned that to love truly means that you have to have true love to draw from, and that starts from within, from realizing what God has given you and embracing it. I think the concept of love was lit as a fire within me in high school in order to keep me from completely turning away from Him and from plunging myself into a darkness that I could not escape. This notion of love, though I could not understand it fully when I came to see its importance, is what kept me on the path pointed to Him. I knew it carried great significance, and because of my natural academic slant toward life, I began to zealously investigate what love truly meant, how love was seen by those who had come before me. I did a lot of this research, I spent tens of hours of my sparse free time simply pouring myself into quotes and ideas and notions of how love looked. I started with Christian views and then moved to other views, hoping to gain a well-rounded grasp on the subject. And I learned a lot, but it took me a while to realize that all of these people could speak intelligently on love because they had experienced it, not through reading and research, but by living a life filled with love. It was hard for me to get that because I could not ever embrace the love that lived inside me, the love God held for me and the love I needed to hold for myself. At this current point, I now see how my intellectual pursuit laid a foundation for me to understand what love was when it eventually came rushing into my life, like a dam broken down and releasing a torrent of waters, so love crashed into me once I destroyed the logjam that was my hatred of myself and the lack of experienced emotions. I am now in a great position where I understand love as a concept as well as feel and experience it, and those two ways of knowing love have utterly changed me as a human being. I don’t know how much I ever rejected God, I know in middle school I held such great disdain for Him and refused to believe that such a God could exist who would love me and yet punish me so greatly. I know in high school I believed even though I found it hard to believe so many times. I know in college I struggled with faith when I saw hypocrisy all around me. But God refused to let me go, He refused to let me slip into those negative thoughts and emotions. And because I never truly was lost, now that I have found my way into His light, I can see how absolutely blessed I have been, and how much I have truly grown. This is the point of this writing, so that when you look back at this 7 or 8 years from now (old man), know that you have accomplished so much. I don’t know where you are at this point, I don’t know if you are with someone or not, maybe you’re married, maybe you even have kids. Maybe you’re still single and still living the life that God has placed in front of you. Wherever you are, know this: you’ve never been lost, and you will never be lost, not for long anyway. He’s gonna bring you right back into things, just wait and see. I hope you are as happy as I am now, still living in the joy that is so new to me still. As of the time of this writing, your father has been gone for just under 3 weeks, and that’s hard right now, but I know you’ll get to a good place with it again soon. Keep your head up, wherever you are in life, and know that He loves you so, so much. Keep loving yourself too, never lose that.