Now that the squad is finally back together, and hearing their stories, I am realizing that though I learned a lot the last 3-5 years, I have also forgotten a lot too. I need to stop invalidating what I did best from college in high school, which was to love on others wholeheartedly and bring people together. I need to remember what it is like to be vulnerable again, to share again, to laugh again. I need to remember to see people as people, with hearts and souls. I need to remember that people are fragile creatures just like myself, and the fastest way to another person's heart is to reveal the cracks in my own heart. I need to bring back the 3am conversations and be content in each other's company. I don't need everyone to be on the same page as me theologically or relationally. But I do need people to be real, and to do that I need to be real first. I need to be kind again. Something I had lost after I got the innocence and naivety beaten out of me through failure and betrayals. I feel like I've come full circle, but now that I am older and have seen just a little bit more of the world than my 18 or 21 year old self, I understand that I am to overflow into others both in love and in truth. I need to stop making the same mistakes and falling into the same mental and emotional traps. I guess...this can be my New Year Resolutions (or lifelong resolutions). God please let the squad learn to love one another and love on those we meet in the future. Thank you God for letting them remind me of what the Gospel is to me, how the Gospel has shaped my life for the past decade or so, and how through the Gospel I can be the light to my friends and to the world. Let these words be honest and ring home. Amen!


“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” - C.S. Lewis