4/04/2004 10:49:00 PM|||Andrew|||Movies can sure teach you in powerful ways sometimes. I was watching Forrest Gump tonight, and something dawned on me...the kind of something that just sits in your mind and dwells there until you get it out somehow...by talking about it or writing about it or something. So it was tonight. I'm not sure quite when it was, but I realized (or remembered, as Plato might have it) something about what I've been missing all this time, I think. It's about love...but isn't everything, in the end? It isn't that I miss having someone who loves me, because even in all those years I didn't always feel that. It's that (and permit me to be sentimental and even have a good cry maybe) I miss loving someone. I don't miss any confidence in what another person feels for me; I miss the strength that an ever constant love on my part gives me. I think I miss the purpose it provides.

Now, I know that the true fufillment of these things can only be found in God and in his mysteries, yet I also know that he has made each of us, and more specifically me, to love not only him but others around us. And he has given such a precious gift: the gift of loving another human being just as or beyond your own self. My journey with God moves forward by his grace, and I am ever grateful for that. I detract nothing from that.

Some of the few who read this thing regularly might remember something I wrote a while back, about the two great questions in life, something I had learned from a counselor I saw for a while. Go look it up if you like, I think it was some time in January, but here's a brief summary. There are two great questions in life. The first is "Where am I going?" and the second is "Who will go with me?" For the first, while I don't know all the details, I think I'm pretty solid and getting more so each day in the essentials. I go where He leads. Somehow I've found myself thinking about the second question lately. Not, as I said before, because I have any need or desire to be loved, but because I have a longing so great that it must be divine, to give of myself to another.

Well that's me. At least I've gotten all that out somewhere, even if no one reads or cares. And if by chance someone does, all the better. Mostly I just write to myself here anyway. Anyone listening in on my private conversations with myself isn't my problem. Goodbye now, peace be on you always, and may God grant you someone you can love always.|||108114415816007334|||Love