What's the benny?

[joel]

But what’s the benefit of graciousness
if you forgive me everything and I
refuse to trust you? Isn’t love a mess?
Perhaps it’s in attempt to clean I cry
so often— maybe thinking I might pry
some order out of life if tears would wick
the grudges from my face. If I deny
you, how will you deny me? Is it cyclical,
these self denials? Am I sick
to think of love this way? But then you yell
at me— you say you don’t believe me, flick
my ego to the gutter, and you tell
me, “I deny this gracelessness is you
because I love you. You are loved. It’s true.”

[saw]

I think because of movies and the like we come to believe in the perfect love, of finding that special one without flaws, and when we do it will in turn make us flawless as well, because that's what love is, two people so meant for each other, that they will never have to work hard at the relationship, they can kick back and live happy ever after.....like, well.......a fairytale.......

love is complex to the degree that it often includes hate......if you're lucky the love greatly over shadows the other part, if not you're in for some lulu fights, heartache and pain......but even then we may still hold a sliver of love....

what a nutty planet......we work from the moment we're born to the day we die, trying to figure it all out........hang in there my friend.....

[joel]

two people so meant for each other, that they will never have to work hard at the relationship, they can kick back and live happy ever after.....like, well.......a fairytale.......
...
hang in there my friend.....

Thanks. I'm blessed because my romantic love-life is pretty incredible (first anniversary is this Sunday). And I'm blessed because "love" has never been my toughest area of life. But the love that happens in faith...that's tricky...and wrestling...and imperfect, though it consumes more and gives more than I ask of it.

My question for love -- for faithful, relational love -- is how can real love include the denial of its object [2 Timothy 2:12b]? How is that loving? Where and when?

...questions...always questions...

[stilltrucking]

"What's love got to do with it?"

I always thought that was a good question."

Myth and the Modern World

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Thanks for the poem Joel, I always find something in your poetry I can use.