Thursday, February 12, 2009

chia pet love

This is totally a spin-off of the blog from ccf and the actual immersion last night. but it has really hit a spot with me for some reason! we talked about love. and not the mushy or sexy kind of love that hallmark tends to run toward this time of year (btw...anyone paid attention to how many valentine's cards are geared toward sex this year?! it would be safe to say about 1/3 of all the cards i looked at were!) .

anyway, last night Ed talked about love in comparison to a garden. he said that the kind of love that is the mushy hallmark-y type can be best compared to a chia pet. Chia pets, as we all know, are an idiot-proof plant that is basically kill-proof. But! They don't have roots...they're just pretty to look at. Love relationships like that (and i'm not talking just boyfriend/girlfriend, i'm saying friends, parents, everyone!) are based in "nothing." you may talk or have common interests, but you never really SHARE with each other. Relationships like that are like a chia pet...no roots...no real foundation and prone to wash away when the rains come.

but love as a garden (more specifically i will use a dandelion becuase we know how stubborn they are to get rid of in the yard), is deep-rooted. in the case of the dandelion, the grass and dirt must make way for the deep roots and yellow flower or breezy white top of the dandelion. they must "SHARE" the space they have been given. let me just go on a tangent here and say that i am not saying that in a deep-rooted love, you should be the kind of dandelion that takes over the entire yard and chokes all the grass out...i hope you get the connection there. lol. what i am saying is that we, like the dandelions, must share with each other in order to have a deep relationship. we can share about how we feel about certain subjects (political, spiritual, emotional, family, personal) and i don't just mean TALK about them...i mean share excatly how we feel about things. The idea is to get personal...to feel intamacy with someone.

something else that has been getting to me is the sense of family that we should be embracing as Christians in our communities. I am specifically talking about Christian to Christian love here, becuase i feel that as a non-Christian it is very difficult to grasp this concept (i know, i lived without understanding it until not quite a year ago myself, and i WAS/am a Christian). now i have a boyfriend (Ronnie), and i love him very much...in a romantic kind of way. our love is like chia growth and dandelions intertwined...we "love", but we share so much of our lives with each other. sometimes i struggle with what i am about to say because i'm not sure that Ronnie totally "gets" the concept...he understands it, but it is easy to not get. It's not that he's ignorant-he has simply not had much of a chance to experience it himself, and it is something that has to be experienced to understand. But my point! I have always grasped (well for as long as i can remember) that my girlfriends are my sisters. i have treated them all as my sisters and loved them as such. but brothers, oh brothers! they have given me a fit. maybe it was just being too young to see boys/men as only someone who was cute or i would like to date or, if i were dating someone, boys were the ones i was supposed to stay away from! and i have felt that very much up until even this past semester.

This past semester however, we had a day on the fall retreat when the speaker sat us all down at long tables with loaves of bread and large cups of grape juice. he told us to eat and drink and talk with one another as if we were a family having dinner b/c in fact, that was pretty much what we were doing! It hit home with me that guys could show brotherly love to a girl when Charles reached over and put his arm around me and prayed over me. i was in such shock (stupidly) that i couldn't even pray for him back! lol. i don't know why it surprised me so much but it did. he truly cared for me as a sister. and although i have felt that before with one of my best guy friends, Rickey, i was too young to really get it. and then after that, i was hugging everyone-i hugged all the girls i think and a couple of the guys (i still didn't know a lot of them too well). And now, every Tuesday night, i look forward to seeing my family. i look forward to hugging and chatting with all of my sisters, even ones i don't know! and i look forward to hugging my usual brothers, Charles and Josh, and to seeing who will hug me next! haha...i have really grown to like this love because it makes me feel that i am appreciated and cared about by someone other than my sweetheart and my biological family.

i don't mean to embarrass anyone by mentioning names, but i though it was important. and again, this is no way de-valuing the love of my biological family or the constant loves i get from Ronnie, it is simply a new experience. it makes me want to say to all of my friends "i love you because you are my friend and thank you." so i hope you know who you are :-)

*hugs* -r.

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