words to keep in the front of your mind.

I recently read this great peace of wisdom as someone's status update on facebook (of all places!). Despite the medium, the wisdom remains. I have kept these words at the forefront of my mind for a week now and have returned to them more times than I can count. In just a week. They are:

"People will disappoint you. Love them anyway."

They seem simple, and perhaps, even at first a little pessimistic. But the truth is that God created us to be our frail, disappointing (at times), human selves. It is a guarantee that we will be disappointed in life by the ones we love, and equally guaranteed that we will at some point disappoint the ones we love. But despite our humanity, despite mine and yours and the humanity of those who have disappointed us most recently, we are called to love anyway.

I have been experiencing this firsthand as I have been feeling majorly let down by someone who has never really let me down before. I've been struggling to be patient with this person, and I've been confused by my own disappointment (not confused by the fact that I was disappointed, but by the fact that this particular person was responsible and because this particular person seems not to be able to control the cause of my disappointment). I feel as though I have only just begun to react-- finally my patience wore down and I began to feel a response aside from confusion and sadness. I have begun to feel bitter, cynical even towards a person that I love. And that deep hurt has taken it's toll: I've recently grown exhausted of my own roller coaster emotions in this situation and have begun to yearn to be able to dismiss. To dismiss the thing that causes me to hurt, the situation that is ongoing and exhausting, and most seriously, to dismiss the person who causes me to feel hurt and exhausted. And that is a scary place to be, ready to dismiss someone. A person.

People aren't disposable. We can't dismiss them. We shouldn't erase them from our lives, move on and away and fill their places with new people. The least of which is because, hello, new people will also fail us in some way or another. It's guaranteed. It's our human inheritance.

This is not to say that we are all so flawed that we all will fail and that we should give up. Nor is this an excuse for said failure. It is only an honest attempt at reconciling our imperfection with our imperfect expectations of one another.

But what we are called to do, is to look beyond that flaw, that which hurts us. To see aside from the disappointment, the value of the person, and to continue to love. We will be disappointed. We will get angry. We may even grow dismissive. But what makes them human also makes us human. And the holiest thing I can be, is the flawed human thing that God made me to be. And I still deserve love. So does the one who let you down.

These should not be words of imprisonment. They should not be utilized to keep someone in an abusive relationship, or chain someone to a situation that is unhealthy. It is okay, sometimes, to love from afar. But when we let our feelings towards someone take control; when we become a bitter person instead of just tasting bitterness; perhaps it is wise to just remember that people will disappoint us. And that we should love them anyway.

This week those words of wisdom are helping ME to be the holiest I can be, and to move on from my own disappointments to remember that I too am an imperfect disappoint-er (aiming for holy and not holier-than-thou, mind you). It's so much easier to forgive and dismiss a situation than become bitter and try to dismiss a person. God doesn't throw people away, and neither should we.