I love you.

Those eight letters fit a universe of meaning inside of them, a meaning you don’t fully comprehend, yet somehow you still have the audacity to utter them.

If you stopped to think about it you would be crushed under the weight of those words. The impossibility of them. The glaring, shameful truth that you are not capable of them. You would place each of your relationships under a microscope and see all the ways you have violated the meaning of those words. And you would stop saying them. 

So you take those words in your hand, ready to bury them and with them any responsibility to be the things that love asks: kind, patient, gracious, humble, selfless, honest, hopeful.

But what kind of life would you lead if you silenced love? 

You can’t help but wonder if that life would be one of fragile self-shame packaged safely inside the bubble wrap of lukewarm niceties.

That is not what you want.

Because each morning when you wake there is an ache in your bones reminding you that you have been shaped by the hands of Love for love. 

To stop speaking love would be to stop striving for it. To stop striving for it would be to stop living the life for which you were formed.

Yes, the love you have to offer is cracked and sometimes crumbles at the edges. It is broken, but it is still good for giving.