Love deep, hurt deep

I was ruminating on some recent happenings in my life today as I walked the streets of Salt Lake City. My heart is sad, and it hurts. I was thinking about why and voiced this thought out loud to a friend. In response, she said something that I have been chewing on all day.

She said, " Your heart was open to him, you made a decision to care about him. And not just kind care but deeply care. Now that its over and you may be hurt, the impressions he left on your heart are deep. Its not something just just get over. Because you love deeply, you hurt deeply."

While all of the other stuff is true, the last sentence is what struck me. Did I love him? I believe so. Do I still? Yes. In every sense of the word that I have been able to study in the last five weeks of my life, I believe I do. Now, that being said... Because I chose to open my heart to something so wonderful, I also chose to open my heart to the same opposition.

I believe it falls in with how I feel about sharing the gospel. It truly is a love in my life. It makes me happy and I enjoy seeing how it changes other people's lives. As I open my heart to that and come to love the people, I also open my heart to the pains of them walking away from what they know to be true.

In life we wish for all sorts of things, we wish over lots of things. Most of the time we don't wish for the easy things, we wish for the big things. Things that are out of reach. We wish that our words didn't have to be half-spoken. We wish that we could have that stupid sentence back again. We wish that we could just love deep, and that is how it would be for the rest of forever. We wish for a lot of things.

But for now, we walk the path of uncertainty knowing that if we open our heart to love, we also open it up to everything else out there. The question is, are we strong enough to overcome that which has been put on our plate? Will we humble ourselves enough to open our eyes, look up, and ask for the strength we don't have ourselves? Will we stay to learn the lesson, or will we walk away? Words were never meant to be half-spoken.