Romance is a life choice, a true to life story, no doubt usually full of exaggeration or fanciful invention. But that is why it is so powerful. Romance captures the imagination. It is a romantic spirit, sentiment, emotion or desire, a true to life fable if you will. A story or event that is too amazing to be true and thus cannot be real, but something only dreamed of. Women are romantics; they dream of a fable and pray it real. But.. the bills do come in, the debts do need to be paid off, works still happens, dinner needs to be cooked, and there might not be flowers, or candle light, champagne, or chocolates but those aren't the necessities of romance.

Romance is a look, it is a soft touch, it is a smile after a long days work. To some it can even look like diet coke, spaghetti and the TV. To others it can look like going to work everyday and paying the bills to support the family. To others it can look like cooking a meal. Flowers, candlelight, champagne and chocolate are nice treats but real romance is a life choice to love proactively.

Ever have a day when you lose sight of your goals...


It's just the kind of day when you're minding your own business and it suddenly dawns on you that for a year, or any length of time is going to be spent doing blah. It's kinda scary. I don't want to be blahing for any length of time!


Scary for this reason: for a brief moment, in that day, we are incapable of seeing more than that span of time ahead of our own situations. We are incapable of suspending our own cultural and situational understandings; we become self-minded.


"God, what the hell am I doing here???" We forget. But we're human! Hopefully, it doesn't last long. Hopefully, shortly after praying such a prayer, that God is good to remind us: "This is a trial period of your life, a step necessary to grow you and learn you to get you to the place I want you to be so that you are most effective for my purposes."


Then, I discover the book of James. Turns out God is good to remind.

Besides being a catch line for a top 40 song, it's true that even in the earliest phases of fall that leaves fall to the ground as if they were raindrops. They are diverse in size, shape, colour. Of course they are a trademark of wimpy trees, usually no bigger than a radius of 15cm.


In a world with priorities, deadlines, speeding and speeding tickets, worries and inhibitions, a young man with all of these to his own will go for a late friday evening stroll through downtown--only to find out that none of those things matter. At all. They come and go like the leaves; they grow on the lives of peoples who allow them, but it's not the leaves we see standing later. It's not the leaves that stand the test of time.


What does matter? What is it that leaves a lasting mark--what is it that we see standing after the leaves are gone?


Words spoken, actions witnessed, relationships maintained...these are all good. But the thing that matters most is easily witnessed in a brief moment on this young man's late evening stroll. There, on the most insignificant stretch of insignificant stores and amongst a collection of the most insignificant people, there sits another young man, who looks up and utters a few things--he needs money. Some, however, might understand that this sitting young man needs something bigger and better than money. He needs something that matters more than money, he needs something that amalgamates all of the best that more than this world has to offer.


He needs love.


And it's love that is what is standing when we go into winter. A tree with no leaves is not dead. A tree is the core of the being that makes the being function, from it leaves grow and leaves fall. It's love that matters. To love, to be loved. Love leaves a lasting mark; it scars when it hurts, it's the reason we cry at a funeral.


It's all that matters. Love, never like a leaf, never comes and goes. And so, peering out a window, I'm reminded of this universal, mathematical phenomenon that God created and called "Life". Everything is beautifully, perfectly related. Admire for yourself--I promise you, eventually you'll crack a smile.

- housesit. F


- live in "group home" or house with lots of rooms rented. FF


- choose to bike to work. FFF (i may take this one back as the ride gets easier)


- HOUSESIT. WHAT THEF--