Book of Eli: Love More.

"Dear Lord, thank you for giving me the strength and the conviction to complete the task you entrusted to me. Thank you for guiding me straight and true through the many obstacles in my path. And for keeping me resolute when all around seemed lost. Thank you for your protection and your many signs along the way. Thank you for any good that I may have done, I'm so sorry about the bad. Thank you for the friend I made. Please watch over her as you watched over me. Thank you for finally allowing me to rest. I'm so very tired, but I go now to my rest at peace. Knowing that I have done right with my time on this earth. I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I kept the faith."

-The Book of Eli

I rented this movie because my sister Krystal told me to. It was definitely a bit more violent then my comfort level at first, but then I started paying close attention to the screenplay. It's infused with scripture. It was marvelous.

There was a line spoken in the movie with Eli talking about what he learned in the process of protecting the 'book', which he says, "I was carrying and reading it everyday, got so caught up in protecting it, I forgot to live by what I'd learnt from it... to do more for others than you do for yourself."

How often have we harnessed our beliefs, and held steadfast to the belief but have forgotten that belief is not just something to be kept or captured in faith. It's a life. It's love in action. And because God is love, and Faith in God means Love- the belief always turns into a verb and not just an adjective.

This summer I saw a lot of love in action. It began with seeing Sandy love her little ones so well when I stayed at her house in Connecticut between Oregon/Ct/China. I spent a few days with her, albeit in an emotional train wreck state, but I witnessed the love a mother has for her children. How they are each different and beckon a different part of your attention depending on their age. I watched her patience, and her impatience. I took that into my time in China as I loved children who did not yet know who their parents were going to be. It was a powerful movement of my heart and I was thankful for the ways in which it forced to me to recognize the lack of love in action in my own life- both at my own doing, and that which was brought unto me.

Sometimes I just forget to love more. To let what I believe transform my life and my purpose, and not just be something that I hold so tightly onto that I'm unable to let it breathe. Take shape. Form into something wild and beautiful.

Often said that if you love something/someone let it be free, if it was meant to be, it will come back to you. I have wrestled with what that means, and how I truly feel about it. I think its true that if you love someone or something, that self sacrifice in letting it go is one of the greatest measures we can do in Love. I saw that this summer, and I remember it being one of the absolute last things I said to Tex as we parted ways and agreed to pray during my time in China for resolute answers. I knew that letting go of what I had been holding onto meant that I was not less attached or cared less. It meant that it was worth the open abyss of possibility in Christ. It is what holding on, and letting go looks like when happening at the same exact time. Love calls us to seek, serve, and be active for one another. It's self sacrificing. It's selfish. It's hard. It hurts.

But what comes in its wake is something marvelously beautiful. A glimpse of Heaven. It's another part of our garden's sowed, torn apart and replanted. I am coming through to this side of that lesson. I can see more and more things that I have learned, struggled, and fought for and how in the capacity of letting go and giving it up, I have been given more then that which I had originally struggled to loosen my grip on.

Do more, love more, serve more, in the capacity of others then yourself. Let your faith and love be something that you foster in words, in silences and spaces. Don't let it be something you hold so closely to yourself that you forget what it is designed to do. Change the world. Bring more of Christ to this Earth and give those we are surrounded by a vision of what they are missing.

And then let our most sincere thoughts and prayer be like that of above, spoken at the end of a very thought provoking movie, "I have fought the good fight. I finished the race. I kept the faith".