my love is loud.

in all the chaos, i have totally forgotten how i love. i love so deeply, so intensely. i don't know how to love any other way. it is so unnatural for me to love shallowly and with plastic speech. i don't know how to have surface relationships. i have always struggled with that, because i want to love "hard" and loud. it is in my genes. my entire family is this way. my mom and dad, they have never met a stranger and love so hard and are so loyal. my cousins, my aunts and uncle, we are all that way. i know it scared ian and jenny when they first married into our mess of love with me and chris and our "love is loud" family. but to love this way, it is how i grew up. this kind of passionate love can be extreme and wonderful and volatile all at the same time...that is what passion is. it swells within you, uncontrollable at times but it breeds an empathetic spirit and you just love back, taking on one another's joys and pains...it has been both a blessing and a curse because as madly as i love, i hurt that madly as well. i have struggled my whole life to find the happy medium and it seems like it is not to be. i was told on a mission trip once, when i was moved to heavy crying and pain while seeing hurting children, to think about that God made my heart like that so in my deep hurting for others, i would be moved to action on the behalf of other's suffering. it liberated me to think that my intense way of hurting for others could somehow be productive and find it's purpose that way instead of just feeling like my emotions were "just being a girl" like i had been told so many times by friends growing up. no, now that i stand in the this tornado, i know i was created to hurt and feel other's pain intensely for a reason. sympathy is wonderful. empathy is a gift. a gift that was once wrapped in your own pain and now recycled in pretty paper to give hope and comfort to another that needs it.