love is small

Love is small.  There is no need for it to be grand, it simply needs to be present.

A couple of weekends ago I was thinking about how this is true.  I want to start loving intentionally.  Otherwise my days and moments can easily get filled with things that don't go beyond myself.  But to love intentionally, to think about someone else and actually following through, that is how I want to live. 

It's not that love is hard or that I don't want to love others...it's that if I'm not intentional I don't make the time to actually do it.  And, I add intentional because sometime the act is actually done, but love is not present.  

In light of this, we recently...

• Sent gifts to friends - wanting them to know that we were thinking about them, grieving with them and wanting them to know that we were remembering too.
• Sent a little reminder/encouragement for someone to enjoy being by herself
• Remembered a birthday and sent a gift to our nephew (I hate to add this to intentional love because it seems quite obvious, but sadly enough remembering a birthday is a huge feat within this home)

Love is small.  Love is something we are all capable to be and do.

"They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, small words of kindness, a thought of others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting." - Mother Teresa

Love does not care who we are.  We do not have to be special to give or partake it.  We don't need anything to give love or to be love to someone else.  It takes no money or prestige. It does not need the right opportunity.  It takes only of ourselves.

Small things done in great love can often be unnoticed, unseen...and yet I'm believing that this is where every good and beautiful thing starts.  In the small acts of love. It is simple.

I've been considering this:
Love is...
patient
kind
joyful in truth
protecting
trusting
hopeful
persevering

it is not...
envious
boastful
proud
rude
self seeking
easily angered
keeping tabs or recording wrongs
delighting in evil

There are many wonderful things that can be done, but they will fade.  If we don't have love, we really have nothing.  Love is the most beautiful. 
(1 Corinthians 13)