"Love is not a silk flower -- always bright, with artificially whitened teeth and a fake tan. No, love is a fight. Love is what happens when you've been hurt and you want to quit. Love is what happens when you decide not to. Love is not the beginning of the story but the ending." -Jon Foreman

These words ring painfully true in me. How often I am tempted to give up, quit. What am I giving up on, exactly? Living, I think. Choosing death over life. Choosing not to be a blessing and to back away from the Father in fear. Sometimes I feel like I'm running away from myself, but I'm running on a treadmill, and am not really going anywhere, but in circles, but deep into the rhythms of my own anxious thoughts. I do still hope...hope 'never stops at all' in the words of Dickinson. And I have a hope in the living God, the healer of our every ill, the Prince of Peace, the Lover of my Soul.

I have been hurt. Which sometimes makes me want to hurt back. It sometimes makes me not want to give or show my heart, because I put it on the line, and it was blown away in the wind, or stomped on, or regarded as of little consequence. Maybe not even by those I think have hurt me, but by myself.

So what happens now?