When I was younger, I wanted to be a preacher.

I think I loved people pretty well back then, for the most part.

I didn’t expect a lot from others.

I didn’t demand a lot from them.

I had a decent policy of “care, don’t compare.”

You can’t love well if you spend your life comparing all of the time. Comparison drops us into legalism. Incremental metrics drive our evaluations of individuals, events, traits, and competencies, and in reflex, drive us into a pitched battle of self-acceptance vs. self-rejection.

Love is open-handed.

And the preacher, he spoke for love, from the word of Love Himself.

And I believed that.

But along the way, at some point, I fell back.

Maybe it was in college, when suddenly I didn’t pass most classes with easy, with excellence. I suddenly thought I was not smart enough.

Maybe it was during college, and after college, when the next thing is love and romance, and I lost confidence in myself socially, because I started staring at myself socially. I found I could not turn down the reverb in my thoughts, and my simple evaluation of events each day buzzed with analysis of my place within them. Was I acceptable? Was I likeable?

Love is other-minded. I regard myself, but I am to revel in the other.

But maturity brings pain and hardship.

And I lost confidence in what I had believed before: that I was okay. That I was enough. That I was. I began to think, and to fear, that I was not.

Is that adulthood- leaving the port of the familiar, pushing out into the seas of life, equipped with a compass and maps, but many of which remain locked in a foot locker in some low-decked cabin somewhere?

I think the message I loved, and that inspired me when I was younger and wanted to be a preacher, remains true. God is love, and He helps those who call in Him.

But I lost faith in that message for me personally. Not because He had expelled me from the reach of his good nature.

In time, I expelled myself.

“You are not lovable. You cannot be loved.”

This is the cancer that eats up a human heart, and creates addictions, megalomaniacs, sociopaths, and suicide bombers.

“And the people built a cosmic vacuum pump and turned it on to remove sentiment, respect, cordiality, kindness, service, consideration, and conciliation from the atmosphere around them, and then they wondered why life had become so hard, bestial, flagrant, and submerged in violence from indifference.

“You did not want a heart any longer. You did not want to care. You did not want to feel anything any more.

“You did not want the inescapable side-effects of living a lifestyle of loving, which requires vulnerability and interaction.

“This is why the world is now ran by rocks.”