love and vulnerability and bruised hearts

I had such clear-cut view of love when I was a little kid. I was supposed to love everyone because Jesus loved everyone, but I didn't have to like everyone (a point which brought me no small relief), and there were two kinds of love. There was the love I had for friends and family, and then the kind of love my parents had, that forever romantic love in sappy movies, that force permeating the air in churches and bride-walked aisles.

The older I get, the more I see love isn't one thing but a whole genus with so many different species. That love thing, the one we all look for, that undying unfaltering devotion and starry-eyedness, it's such a rare bird I don't know if it exists. I'd like to say it does. I think I've seen it. I have to believe it does in order to keep going some days.

Then you get those kinds of love that start as friend-love then move beyond that into some kind of 'real' love (because somehow our culture thinks friend-love is rarely 'real') and then...you can lose it. You can fall out of *that* kind of love. Maybe sometimes it does last. I know once you choose to care about someone, some part of you can never really quit. But that kind of deeper love? Losing that or being forced to give it up is so damn hard. It plays with you in ways you never imagined capable.

But don't tell me it doesn't exist. It exists in those moments between time, the spaces between seconds when you see a man and a woman create their fragile own world as they look into each other's eyes. Whether it lasts? That is a question too great for me. I'm too young, too inexperienced to even attempt an answer. Perhaps I always will be, perhaps I'm always destined to chase the answer.

The one thing I know is that Love exists, and He is perfect, the Form of love, if you will. And some days that knowledge doesn't feel like enough. It is, though. It is enough. Because if we had that perfect love now, we would have nothing to anticipate, for which to hope, in which to have faith.