why keep loving?

I guess for me it started after high school. Graduation came, and then all the people I thought I couldn't live without dispersed to various colleges or jobs over the south. The people I had spent the last 4 years getting to know and growing to love, left. Then I moved to Chattanooga, only for a semester. I spent several months getting to know people, and then I left. I moved to Knoxville and really got involved at school and church. At UT, I spent day after day in nursing classes and clinicals with girls who I grew to love like sisters. We went through what, at the time, really felt like the hardest years of our lives together, and we carried each other through it. I dug in to a college ministry where people older than me mentored me, and people younger than me looked up to me, and we made mistakes and we succeeded and we ran some and we sat some. We did life together, through the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. We loved Jesus together, and we loved each other. And then, graduation came, and everyone I had spent the last 4 years pouring into and letting in dispersed to do life all over the world [from Knoxville to Texas to Florida to Montana to London to 13 country races to Haiti and on and on], including myself. So then I found myself in Haiti, loving with everything I had on a bus full of ladies and a house full of kids and a family that I never knew I had. And after 9 months God directed me home, so I left, and said goodbye, again.

Over and over, the same thing seems to happen. Say hello, love with your whole heart, then say goodbye, and a part of you gets left behind. So now here I am, in a new town with new people and a new job, and I find God giving me opportunities one after another to dig in, to pour out, and to love. And what I feel inside is my heart pumping the breaks, wanting to rebel against the possibility and inevitable outcome of leaving again at some point, wanting to avoid the hurt that comes with it. I feel my soul starting to panic and the sadness of missing everyone who has ever come and gone begins to cloud my mind and impair my ability to love well.

And isn't that how it will always be? Won't we always leave, or they will, whether by choice or by chance. So what are we to do? Stop loving? By no means. When I feel that panic rising in me, I look back. I take time to sit and think about my life, about who I was and who I am and who I am working to become. And it's only when I let myself embrace the hurt of missing people that I realize parts of my life that are different because of the time I spent knowing them. I am a changed person, ever changing, because of the people who have come in and out of my life. They, you, have made me who I am.

My parents have always been big on the video camera. They video taped every birthday, Christmas, Easter, school play, piano recital, and a million other things from our childhoods. We had all the tapes coped to DVDs, and now we have them filed away in order in a safe place because they are priceless. Every so often we get the urge to pull them out and put them in, and me and by siblings will sit for hours watching ourselves grow up. You would think videos of the big days, the main events, would be the ones we enjoy the most. But they aren't. The discs labeled "every day play" or "snow day" or "playing outside", those are the favorites. The glimpses of our everyday, ordinary lives where nothing spectacular was happening and no major life changes were taking place, where we were just kids doing day to day things and figuring it all out as we went, those are our favorite tapes.

Sometimes we want to look at life and measure it according to the "big" moments. The milestones or highlights so to speak. But when I look back at where I've come from I find that the in between times and the relationships along the way are what has made me who I am. The ordinary days, the times where I was just living... those are the times that shaped me most.

So what choice do we have but to keep on living, and keep on loving, and keep on with the day to day to day, so that one day we can look back and see how these ordinary days changed us.