This Is About Love...

This is about love, but not the kind of love that ends like a fairy tale, sadly. It's not the kind of love we know comes only from God-- that is, thankfully, a constant, and it remains evergreen, what a humbling love that is. But no, this is not that.

It's about a love I felt, in a time that felt like a lifetime ago. A love that engulfed my entire mind, and gave me a hope I hadn't felt, and have not felt since. And now, in retrospect, I don't understand why it did that for me, because barely anything this person did or said should have given me the impression that this was a hopeful kind of love. Alas, I loved anyway.

Maybe, maybe it was the way I fit perfectly within him whenever he hugged me, that perfect disparity in our heights, how he towered above me, I felt safe. Maybe it was the way he smelled, like precious oils soaked in sandalwood. Maybe it was the way he spoke, his voice soft as silk, I can still hear it now as I write this, and even now I remember his singing, how could anyone sing so softly?

Maybe it was the way he spoke to me, imparting knowledge, listening to me argue and drinking knowledge from me just the same. Maybe it was in the little things he did, the things that, though now I realize he may have been doing for a thousand others, made me feel like he did them for only me, and so maybe, in some other world, I was the center of his orbit, as he was mine.

Or maybe it was the way he seemed to love God, and seemed to want to please Him, and it made me believe that maybe, just maybe, I had met the man who was after God's heart and now possibly, maybe, wanted mine as well.

And as many maybes I have put into this writing today, is only a fraction of the "maybes" that stampeded my mind, trying to awaken my heart to the fact that all there was, was just these "maybes", nothing more. That this love I thought I felt, it was empty, and I was gliding upon the premise of just my own love, the only one that existed in this world I had built for myself... I was alone.

It's years gone by now, and though I stare now into the past with open eyes at what used to be, but never could have been, I realize that the only love there is for me to hold onto, is this one in 1 John 4:18. It’s this one that never fails, only this. Only this love is perfect; in this love, there is no “maybe”. And though there are other kinds of love, as long as you've got this one, I've come to realize, not just maybe, but surely, you really, truly, will be ok.