I have been reminded as of late about how bad I am at loving people. When you move, people you once were close to grow and change at a different pace...that is, without you. And some of the change is good, some of it isn't, and some of it will turn out to be very different than you first thought. In my own life, I get justice and love confused. I want to right all of the wrongs...even when it turns out, I don't really know what I'm doing. I justify it saying that this is what the love of God looks like, justice and love in equal measure. The only difference is...God is love.

And I?

I am weakness and selfishness wrapped together realizing that sometimes I want to 'right wrongs' that aren't wrong. It comes from an imperfect sort of love that loves the person I remember and who used to be but who is not anymore. It comes from loving the memory more than the present reality. We have to learn to love the broken places and the foreign lands that are inside the people we know best. Sometimes, people don't want you to see those places...and that's their right. But sometimes, they are waiting for those places to be loved.

I am neither just nor kind.

But God has not asked me to carry the weight of justice into all of my relationships, which now I realize is grace. I can learn to love. If we all learn to love, we may be able to build something strong enough to take us home out of this shipwreck. But if we try to be justice, we will all drown. There is only one man whom God asked to be both love and justice...and that man died a horrible death on a cross trying to balance the two. He did it. And I should not pretend that I could easily do the same.