well, well

I have a new sister. Luke and Lauren are married! It was the most beautiful wedding I have ever experienced. It was so full of God--His presence was felt so tangibly.
I cannot describe how pleased I am with this new union. I have the utmost and highest respect for my brother, and he has chosen an exquisite, beautiful, Godly woman whom I admire as well. Their relationship has been a model for so many spectators--a real, respectable, God-centered romance and friendship. I so look forward to watching their relationship grow even more, and their love deepen further still.

All this love in the air is intoxicating. I've been reflecting on love a lot lately--not just romance and such (since I am not currently in that sort of relationship), but love in all relationship: God, family, friends, the church. It is so beautiful. Such a gift, to love and be loved. If I take a moment to think of the greatest joys in life, or the deepest pain ever experienced, it is centered on people and on relationships with other individuals, not a pain of physical ailment or the pleasure of possessing any object.

What is love anyway? I think it's when you care so deeply for a person that you willingly surrender your own desires, preferences, and health for them--not for a reward in return, but for the sake of caring for them; you make your best effort to help them to be the best person they can be. How many people do I truly love? Who am I selfless for? Who loves me? How often do I take the love I have received for granted? And to think that all love is from God--in every person, God is present (often denied, and ignored, but still hidden somewhere in the heart)--that God himself is love--my mind can't quite be wrapped around it yet.

I came across this quote while reading C.S. Lewis a while back, and it really plucked a heartstring with me (ha, just came up with that analogy, I'll be using it again sometime.) I actually even took the time to memorize this entire passage, just so I can have it stored in my mind, retrievable at any given moment.
The quote is this:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously-no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner-no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden."

Life is about people, it's about love, and more than anything it is about Jesus Christ. Why is it so easy to forget that?