extraordinary

curious...

why do we hurt the people that we claim to love?

the space between intentional hurt and unintentional hurt can be far or near... but we still do it.

i know that i have had my share... there have been plenty of times where my mind has been a constant loop of all my mistakes and the things that i have done to hurt different people in my life that i have claimed that i love. but the truth is that i do love them... i think that i just tend to put conditions on love that is truly intended to unconditional.

i think that love needs to be more than just lip service. the actions behind the words will speak louder and more often than any words that any human being can say.

God did not just say that He loved us, but He gave His son and placed Him on the cross. Not only did He die on the cross, but He was humiliated and tortured. He was taken through town and shown to all the people, according to the roman soldiers He was the example of what not to do. He endured all of that for us...

for me. I am supposed to be on the cross... I am supposed to go through the humiliation of being taken through the town while carrying a cross. But God acted differently... God's actions have spoken louder than any words I might hear.

love

i have been thinking a lot about love for the past couple of weeks and for various reasons. let's begin with the obvious...

February is right around the corner... which means the big v-day! why do we need another Hallmark induced day to remind us to do something that we should be doing on a regular basis. now, granted i really did not regularly tell my parents that i loved them until my dad was sick. those just were not words that we used on a regular basis in my house.

i have found, in my not so many years of wisdom, that the word love is tossed around. i hear teenagers saying that they love someone. i hear people proclaiming their love for a car or hamburger. the word has so much mileage on it that i wonder when i hear it, will i actually believe it?

more to come later... still processing!

ct live

as any good fan would do, i rushed over to my iTunes and purchased chris tomlin's newest album. (OK, so i know that they are no longer albums and the fact that i purchased it off of iTunes and still use that reference makes me really old.)

i have a habit of listening to new music while working and having it looped, so i listen to every song again and again. i realized that i momentarily forgot the greatness of worship. listening to the crowd in the background takes me back to the first time i heard tomlin while on the passion tour in 2001.

october 26, 2001: the passion tour rolled through sacramento. my friends had told me that i needed to go to the concert, but i really was not wanting to. i went to our friendly local christian bookstore and got the last ticket in sacramento. at the time i didn't think anything about it, but now i see God's hand in all of it. i think i felt ever emotion that night. i went to the concert completely not expecting to meet God, but there He was... very sneaky on His part.

i can honestly say that my faith journey has included a lot of music. when i think back to certain events, i can honestly hear a sound track playing.

what's on your soundtrack?