Deeply

I've been reading through Acts. It's become one of my favorite things to read. God keeps showing me more and more things.

One thing lately that I've just been so broken about, is missing all of my friends from school.

I am a really deep person. Everything I do is deep... when I talk to people, pray for them, think about them... it's all very real and deep. It can get people like me in trouble. It's not that we wear our hearts on our sleeves... our hearts literally clothe us. it's more that we connect our hearts to everyone else's we meet, and then when the day comes when we leave those people, our very core seems to snap.

How can I leave the people I've loved so deeply for so long? Some not so long, but deeply still.

But isn't this the life God calls us to live? To love deeply. To make people the perfect basin to pour our love into.

The greatest commandments are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

There can be nothing more painful.

I know this all may sound girly and silly in some ways. Ah but such is my heart.

I love reading the book of Acts, because now the entire rest of the New Testament makes so much more sense! All his letters, the other books in the Bible... his deep yearnings to be with those he loves so deeply, even though he was so far from them. People he lived with for years. People he ministered to, and ministered to him...

I can relate.

He devoted his entire life to traveling and spreading the gospel.

He devoted his life to loving people... and above all following where God took him. Sometimes that included places away from the people he loved so deeply.

Ahhhhh my heart just aches having left one place. Greenville. So many people so precious to me. So deeply, deeply precious to me. The people that I prayed for, that held me as I cried, that knocked on the wall and waited for me to knock back, that sang with me, that played guitar for me, that met me for coffee, that ate weird fruit with me, that prayed for me, that were next to me in class, and across the campus from me as I walked there...

I had to leave. I had to do something new. Yeah yeah, I had to graduate. But, God had something new for me. He had to take me somewhere new.

Loving so many people is such a heartbreaking thing when we live a life that is devoted to God. Because it's hard to follow God when he takes us away. Like Paul's life. So many passages in Acts talk about how many tears were shed when Paul would leave people.

But such is a life devoted to God. So full of love it hurts. So deeply devoted to love, so deeply devoted to each other.