The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton. I hope you leave comments then we can share our journey’s with each other!

One of my favorite quotes is by Shakespeare. He says “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken”. It’s from his 116th Sonnet and is the driving force of much that I write.

Love is a choice, it’s an action word. We choose to love till there is pain, we choose to love through the pain until all that’s left is love. Mother Teresa said that and after thinking it through for quite a while I agree with her but, it takes commitment.

In marriage vows we typically affirm that we will love the other through sickness and health, in good times and bad, for richer or poorer.

While I believe it should be the same in friendships, unless they are toxic, and with our family members, I realize there are degrees of love, different kinds of love, but in here what I’m mostly talking about is committing to love others even when it’s not convenient, that when a commitment is made, for the most part you have to see it through and not bail out when it gets tough. I confess I find it a challenge with some of my family, but the word love is an action word, it requires a choice and if you close off love in your heart toward some, then you close off love to all.

So much of today’s version of love isn’t love at all. It’s a thing of convenience, we ‘love’ till it no longer satisfies or is no longer convenient, then we walk away. At best that can only be described as self-love, but true love considers others first, puts others first, it is outwardly focused.

Shakespeare may have put it into lyrical sentences, but what he’s doing is paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13. God initiated love, Shakespeare wrote about it, Mother Teresa said it and I’m working on it. It will be the journey of a lifetime simply because it will take my whole life to figure it out, one step at a time!

If you hang in with me, I hope to share the thoughts and insights of love, compassion, mercy and grace I’ve learned. But, not just love but things learned just by living, working, and playing for all the years I’ve been on this planet called Earth. Some are funny, some are sad, most are simply the result of being an introverted and reflective person!