Now on to a different topic: Friends and a lot of my beliefs and assumptions about the world.

One of my main goals for this past year was to establish relationships that would result in life long friends.  That is my sincerest belief and desire.  Jesus commanded us to love one another.  And here's my interpretation.  I believe that Jesus wanted us to create a community in which people act towards one another like brothers and sisters being vulnerable with one another in sharing each others' burdens.  To be able to show others through our relationships the love of Christ is a goal worth working hard for.  Of course my idea is not a very new or interesting thought and it is an ideal sometimes forgotten or should I rather say hindered by the consequences of intentionally seeking after it: rejection, misunderstanding and conflict.  But in life in order to really connect with people, these consequences happen whether we want them to or not.  Viewing all types of relationships through Christ's love is something that I've learned this year.  

I guess it's hard when we expose more of ourselves to others than we "ought to" and let people really see us for who we are. For me, I have always been an idealist, even now, here as I write, I admit that I am striving for an ideal that seems impossible and maybe considered foolish to some.  Even now I struggle to hold on to my beliefs.  I have always had this fear that people would not respond well to the flaws and inadequacies (selfishness, fear, laziness, pride, envy, greed) that I saw inside myself and I had been afraid to show.  These are areas in my life that I will work on, trusting God each step of the way. It only occurred to me sometime in the middle of my senior year, that the world is not perfect, people are not perfect and I do not have to be.  My belief and vision of what was perfect, was not perfect in any sense.   This realization got rid of my illusions about the world.  One thing I struggled with after my bubble was burst, was the fact that I had a lot to work on.  I have to admit I was down a lot of times throughout this past year when I did realize that I am really selfish and that I needed to think outside of myself and consider others more than myself.  I am so glad to have had friends around me that I could care for and really cared for me as well. They reminded me to be positive about life and trust God with everything and most importantly to be true to myself.

Here's another one of my beliefs, we can only love one another by believing in the person that God created them to be.  Only then can we really stick it out with that person when times get tough and we see flaws in the person we are trying love.  To give that person the benefit of the doubt and really say to yourself, I know that God's still working in this person and through them and even in me, that you can really accept the things that you don't necessarily care for in the other person.**  

Through Jesus's commandment, I hope to discover a more selfless purpose for my life. I want to learn to see others in the way God views them and to love them for it not because I hope to be loved by others, because I am already loved by God, but because God loves me.  

**This belief is based on my assumption of how people meet and get to know one another.  One meets a person and creates an impression of them, good or bad.  As one spend more time around that individual one gets to know more about them.  Sometimes the first impression is good, and we can continue to see good in that person, but if good is all that we see sometimes it can be an indicator that we are not really seeing all there is to see about the individual we are trying to love.  More importantly however, it is when the impression is good and we start to see flaws or when the impression is bad and we start to see more flaws that I feel that Jesus' message really counts.