So it goes...

I remember sitting there, the sand between my toes, staring out at the great expanse called the Pacific Ocean. The air was chilled, in that nighttime way, where you know the sun is the most hidden it's going to be. And this is, as cheesy as it sounds, the beginning of the rest of my life. 

So it goes, much like any beginning, I have my doubts. I analyze and criticize every inch of the situation, but cannot find a scapegoat. It's pathetic really. I am having the time of my life yet I have still let fear creep in and make itself a home in my heart.

This is the next step people take. They fall in love, get engaged and get married. They then have careers, make babies, raise their children and then grow old together. It's a beautiful cycle that many people go through, but only when it works out. When people tell the stories of this beautiful cycle, they leave out the hard parts. But these days, we all see them. Our parents aren't smiling all the time like they were on 1950's television. They argue, they cry, they ignore one another, they go to therapy, it doesn't work. 50% of marriages end in divorce.

So you have love on one side and fear on the other. Fear is a beast. I have been exercising my fear for as long as I can remember, so it's much bigger than love. In the classic film starring Robert Mitchum, Night Of The Hunter, he plays a pastor who has the word "love" tattooed on his right hand and "hate" tattooed on his left. When he notices a kid staring at his ink, he says:

 "Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I'll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t'other. Now watch 'em! Old brother left hand, left hand he's a fighting, and it looks like love's a goner. But wait a minute! Hot dog, love's a winning! Yessirree! It's love that's won, and old left hand hate is down for the count!"

It's interesting how his character says that the right hand "has veins straight to the soul of man". When you get married you put the wedding ring on your left hand, because the ring finger has a vein that goes straight to your heart. I think the battle of love and hate is really a battle of love and fear, because hate is simply a product of fear. And love is attached to your soul, but fear is always right there, trying to take over your heart.

Staring out at the Pacific Ocean, I was watching boats a far off. They looked like fire burning at the edges of the earth. I imagined myself on the boat, coming upon the earth's edge and stopping right at the point where the boat would fall off. I go to the bow of the boat and look over...nothing. It is a vast abyss. I try to adjust my eyes to see if perhaps it's simply darkness that I might get used to and see just fine. But it never changes. The abyss is now staring back at me. We are caught in a moment of eternity. Both fearful of what might be if one of us entered the others world. 

This is love. Love is the unknown, and sometimes all we can do is stare at it, be afraid. We all know how to "act" in love, or how to "be" in love, but none of us really ever grasp the notion of true love. And this is why so many marriages end in divorce. We're all afraid of the edge of the earth. We're all becoming the abyss we stare into; an empty void of nothingness. 

This isn't to say that if you don't end your marriage you haven't succumb to the abyss. I do sometimes, and I'm trying not to. The abyss isn't real. The earth has no edge. We have nothing to fear yet it's what drives out actions, rather than love. Nice people are nice people often out of fear. Mean people are mean people often out of fear. People fall in love out of fear of being alone, and fall out of love out of fear of being stuck. 

Imagine if we were all honest with each other. Instead of saying "I love you" we would say "I fear you". 

After a year of marriage, we had burned on a cookie jar that we painted the verse I John 4:18, one of my favorites. This verse talks about the perfect love God has for us, and how that love should cast out any fear we have, but it also works in any type of love, if we're loving people the way God loves us. The verse says:

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love."

I scream to my crew to take the boat over the edge, and as I close my eyes, fearing for the instant we drop and disappear into nothingness, nothing happens. We continue moving as we did before. I look over the bow and see that we aren't over an edge, in fact, there wasn't an edge at all. 

So it goes....