In honor of the day...

I went to the house of one of my best friends from high school tonight to hang out and catch up with several people I haven’t seen in a while—mostly with the friend whose house it was, as he just got back from a mission a short while ago. It was really great to see everyone, but I left with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.

As I drove home, I was thinking of high school and was reminded me of some negative memories from then that I haven’t thought about in a long time. Don’t get me wrong—my high school years were really quite easy, compared to many. I didn’t get involved in he-saids and she-saids, so they were pretty drama-free on the emotional/friendship end of things. But I guess the feeling that came back to me as I drove home tonight was remembering all those times that I didn’t live up to my real self or what I knew I could be because I felt insecure and vulnerable.  I remembered what it felt like to be a teenager, driving home from a party, replaying something I said in passing over and over again because I was afraid others would misunderstand and think I was been critical or rude or stuck up. I remembered being afraid to talk to certain girls because I wasn’t sure if they liked me. I remember the general feeling of being a teenager that I didn’t know was there until it left later—a feeling as though I was on trial, and that if I did or said the wrong thing at the wrong time, that would count against me in my final sentence.

I haven’t thought about the emotional insecurities of being a teenager in a long time. (Which is good, I think.) I’m definitely past most of those feelings now, even though I really wasn’t in high school that long ago.

But why am I past that? I think that answer is the whole reason for today’s holiday: love. I went away to college, and I remember consciously deciding to love whatever I liked and to love myself, no matter what other people thought. I remember being tired of letting other people influence my emotional health, like I did in high school, and though it took some doing (old habits die hard), I feel like I’ve finally learned to love all of myself, insecurities and stupidity included, in a way that I didn’t know was possible as a teenager. More importantly, I surrounded myself with loving people, who accepted me unconditionally. It’s not that no one I knew in high school was truly loving—all the people I was with tonight were certainly like that, plus many others. I think it was more that I wasn’t ready then to learn the things I did in college through others’ love. Because the people I associate with now loved me like that, they unknowingly granted me the freedom to change who I was and to become who I wanted to be. I didn’t have to fill any particular role for them; I didn’t have to act a certain way. The love of these beautiful people even freed me from the inhibitions and expectations I’d placed on myself. And thanks to their love and confidence in me, I gained that myself.

And that’s how God loves. God places people in our lives that will love us in ways we can’t love ourselves. Thanks to them, and even more, to Him, we love more deeply and fully than we ever could on our own. Our relationships and interactions with everyone we meet have the potential to become mini “love stories.” And these love stories can happen every day, no matter where we are, no matter our romantic relationship status, all depending on the kind of love we choose to radiate.

And as much as the romantic in me wants a “happily ever after,” these God-given, pure love-inspired love stories are the ones I want my whole life to become.




...and these are some of those people that I was talking about. I love them.