let love find you

So how can we receive this gift of love?

First, through surrender. To receive love is to surrender to something. It is yielding and letting go of what we cannot control, and yielding to the one who is offering love to us. It is the regular practice of releasing the ways we protect ourselves from pain, or the fear of it, and giving up to God our assumptions about what that will or could be. It is an invitation to be dependent, to set aside our self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and to open ourselves to the possibility of receiving something we cannot create on our own.

Second, through vulnerability. That means letting go of the walls we’ve carefully built to protect ourselves from being hurt. Love can’t be received if we don’t allow ourselves to be seen for who we truly are. Not just the parts of us that are polished or presentable, but the messy and broken parts too.

Finally, through trust. To trust is to believe that the other has our best interest at heart, that they will not harm us, but rather meet us where we need them most. In the context of receiving God’s love, of letting his love find us, trust means believing that he knows us completely, that he sees our flaws and brokenness, that he still chooses to love us without any reservations.

— Love with Bethany Allen, Advent Meditations

Do Not Love Half Lovers

Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal
is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love
It is you in another time yet in the same space
It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn’t live,
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
What makes you a stranger to them closest to you
and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists
to live a life not half a life

Kahlil Gibran

More Than Able

I have been looping this song since Sunday and until today, after the nth repeat, it still moves me to tears. This song beautifully musicalizes my journey over the past four years: from starting to lose my faith in 2020, to plunging to my lowest and darkest in 2022, then slowly but surely regaining my confidence and trust this 2023.

A lot of things remain uncertain, many are still unknown; life is far from what I hoped it would be. But this time around, it’s easier to embrace the truth that He is more than able — more than able to redeem what was lost, more than able to write a story that is magnitudes grander than what I have been writing all along.

Sunlight Zone

Last Monday, I visited a marine adventure park for work and saw this model of what appears to be an ocean vessel’s control board. I could not help but chuckle upon seeing the diagram of different ocean depths above it.

A handful of the few people who know what I went through have heard me joke about how it felt like I was swimming—no, more like, floundering—in the Marianas Trench of life’s trials last year. I initially thought that the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 already caught me down in the trenches but 2022 effortlessly demoted them to the abyss.

As I stood there, staring at the diagram, I felt a certain lightness at the realization that presently, I could say that I may have already reached the sunlight zone (or the euphotic zone; ENRM 240 is waving). From being an uninhabited deep-diving submersible that is the Deepsea Challenger foraging the depths, I am now a living thing (HAHA), a bottlenose dolphin enjoying the light-rich waters that is brimming with life.

There are still some days when I find myself diving into the twilight zone—like that Guiness World Record-holding scuba diver—but this time around, I usually just float back up in a jiffy. And as much as it would be nice to be on that speedboat, days that resemble such a state are few and far between in this present reality. Besides, being a lover of the sea, there’s a beauty that can only be seen and a strength that can only be developed by being underwater.

Side note: On that same day, I was briefly starstruck after meeting the man who trained two of my generation’s favorite marine characters: Willy in Free Willy, and Flipper, the beloved dolphin. 🐬

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