i reckon it's time i read Narnia, actually.

'cuz i think the thing is, we wonder how one can love. you know, without all those feelings book characters get when you're actually in love, i'm talking everyday, at school at the supermarket, talking to your siblings kind. 

CS Lewis is my absolute favourite writer in the whole wide world. his book Mere Christianity is one that i open and read, wide-eyed, as he answered questions i hadn't even realized i was trying to answer.

but we stuff up, right? how often we say the wrong thing -- or say nothing... we laugh at someone else's expense, we sit by and watch opportunities to love a piece of this lonely world just sit by themselves as we sit, quite contently happy yet knowing that life is something more, that the capacity to care is so much bigger than we believe because... we have Jesus. 

"if we love Him more than we love them, we will love them more than we do now." -- CS Lewis

what's it mean? well, i reckon -- and perhaps you'll find the same is true for yourself -- that i worry so much, that i...despite what CS Lewis said... let my happiness depend on something i may lose. (CS Lewis, don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.)

and what's he's saying here, is... if we love God more than people -- as in, we look up the sky and seek His face and trust that He's right and do what He's sayin' to you and me, putting aside what the people think of us and what they reckon we should be doing, well regardless of all that, and trying to do everything right and everything... love God. 

CS Lewis talks about this in Mere Christianity. And he says, "Don't sit there, trying to manufacture feelings. Think to yourself, if I loved God, what would I do? And then do those things; act as if you did love God. And you will find that you will. God can give you the feelings if He pleases." 

And since I read that (which was really a paraphrase and forgive me if I totally wrecked what he was trying to say) I've read countless times in the Bible how one does love God. And it goes like this:

"The one who loves me obeys my commands." That's what Jesus said. 

That's how we love God. And what'd he say, what'd He 'command'? I know this: He said, Love one another. As if your lives depended on it. 

You want to know something crazily absurdly wonderful? God said, ask and you will receive. 

dear God, 

i want to love. 

i want to love You and the people around me. not just the people who are kind to me but the people i've never talked to. the people who i maybe don't get along with too well and the people who are lonely. cuz You said, when you love the people hurting and lonely and oppressed, the people no-one's loving... the ones no-one seems to care about... the ones left to die... You said, we are loving You. and we all get lonely, we know how it feels. so, God, i ask for courage to care. the courage to live by faith and not by fear, to stop worrying and simply breathe and because you know what?

i am blessed to simply be,

to be free,

to be loved by Thee. 

i say, let's quit worryin'. and trust Jesus. because that is a real thing. the realest. 

and in that, is all the hope in the world, mate. more than the world. in trusting Jesus and letting go of it all, even the things we didn't realize we were holding on to... that is real life.