Today, I woke up, and the second fluorescent light in our suite had given up turning on. Needless to say, it's been a little dark in our room. But somehow, the light in our lives has been making it hard to notice.
The leaves have been changing and fall is upon us and quickly passing into the late autumn that resembles that winter season we all love and dread all the same. My walk down from Stuart hill every day is going to get more daunting, and I might start getting a little bitter about it. However, I'm going to try to appreciate the weather and our beautiful campus in every season that it has to offer. Try to bring me down Ohio! I dare you! With your random sporadic switches from day to day of warm and cold and winds that can knock me down..maybe I'm actually loving it. Just have to keep telling myself that.
I blogged a little bit over a month ago, and I don't feel like that blog had any significance. It said a lot of nothing. And now I find that's odd, because so much not nothing has been surrounding me. My life has been so incredibly full with beautiful and wonderful things and I have been so obsessed with all of it. Yet, there has been something lacking from my life and I wasn't totally sure what it had been. I've been wandering around (rather, running) from event to event and class to class in my life and I'm doing so much but there is something that is still missing. And up until the last weekish, I hadn't been able to really pinpoint what it was.
Does life ever just smack you in the head? In the past week, I feel like life has been smacking the back of my head every single day. The beginning of this past week, I decided that I should read my blog from the end of the school year last year. I hadn't read it in a really long time, and a lot in myself and my life had changed since 5.5 months ago when I wrote it. Here is a quote I could not stop reading over and over when I read back through this.
"I learned that love is reckless and all-encompassing. It is painful and wonderful and hurts and heals us. It is something that cannot be put into words when it is being felt, and something that we have endlessly to give, if we remember that the most important love is that for your Savior and that for yourself, because if we have these loves, then we can give and receive all the other kinds of loves in a more righteous and beautiful way."
Love. That is such a huge part of my life here at Dayton, and it's not that that is the part of my life that has been missing..but I have been missing the acknowledgment of that love. Not only of the love that others have been giving me, but the love that my Savior has been giving me, and the love that I have been denying for myself.
And this week, life has really been whopping me upside the head with it. There is so much love in all of the people all around me. I am overwhelmed with the love that my friends have to offer me constantly and consistently. While I struggle with my own issues on a regular basis, my friends have endless love to offer to me and I have been so amazed by it. And every time I have spent time with one of them (really any of them) this week, I have been struck with a dopey smile on my face because I am literally mind-blown at how much they love me..and how much I reciprocate that love. Sometimes I feel like my heart might burst apart from all of the love that is coming in and going out of it.
And then there's the new people that have been coming into my life the past few months, and then even more recently. It is when I meet these new people that I realize once again how passionate I am about people. I love meeting new people and knowing that I love them before I even know them--and yes that sounds creepy but if you know me, then I think it kind of makes sense. I love when I meet new people and I know that they're going to be important to me just by them being themselves. They give me hope to continue to whatever it is that tomorrow is going to bring, and I get so excited for getting to know them that it's hard for me not to hug attack them and tell them how pumped I am that they are in my life.
And then the experiences. All of the experiences that my life has been offering me have been so packed full of love and I have been so wrapped up with my own thoughts in my own head to really take in the full view of them. I have been joining group after group, and partaking in event after event that literally fills my heart to the point of bursting: but in the most beautiful way. I have been so incredibly blessed here, and I can't even begin to explain how this hit me this week. Sitting in my PORCH group, listening to people talking about the goods and bads of their weeks, I felt overwhelmed by how great they are and I don't even know them yet. Sitting in my classes, I felt overwhelmed with the beautiful view out the window, and all the smart people surrounding me in class. Sitting in IHOP or in mass, I felt overwhelmed by how lucky I am that I get to praise God openly at this wonderful school with so many of these other people desiring to do just that: praise God alongside of me. Sitting in a Phi Lambs meeting, I felt overwhelmed by the amazing people surrounding me that have truly felt like home to me this year. Sitting in the chapel playing the piano for a prayer service for a women I had literally just met, I felt overwhelmed by how thankful I am that I get so many opportunities to share of myself with so many people here. Sitting around a circle introducing myself as a sophomore, I felt overwhelmed by the fact that so much amazing change and so many amazing blessings have sprinkled my life in only a little over a year here. Sitting in my common room lit by white Christmas lights surrounded by people that I rarely get to see and laughing until I cry, I felt overwhelmed by how beautiful my life is. Seriously overwhelmed. Seriously so beautiful.
In these acknowledgments of love, I am hoping to strive towards living more fully in my Savior, and learning more each day to learn to love myself. So, because of all of this beauty and overwhelming, I have realized that acknowledging this love in my life makes all the difference.
God is love. Love is everywhere. I can be love. And I am loved.
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