God is Love and Love is Real

When Jesus was asked what is the most important commandment, he said, "Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." Then he said, "And love your neighbor as yourself."
So really, it seems a bit like cheating. But the more I think about it, the more it seems you cant love God and not love others. Its like an inside out sort of thing. Jesus knew that if we loved God, we would in turn love others. 1 John 4:8 says God is Love. The whole verse says "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love".
What's so hard about this...? Well, unfortunately everything.
In our worlds we don't know "Love". Love is unconditional. God's love is unconditional. We've grown up only knowing conditional love. We try to please God in ways we think we can gain his favor. The same way we try to gain favor from peers, parents, teachers, b/fs and g/fs. We set up rules to follow in order to feel closer to him (Religion). I mean, its the premise of all religions: Follow these rules in order to gain God's love. (I mean, really. That's why most the time I'll tell you, I gave up on religion to follow Jesus.) We think we can lose God's love. We think we can make him stop loving us! All while we wonder why such a being would even CARE about us! Let alone LOVE us in such a way that we can never lose his love.
We all know we have this hunger inside us for love. For acceptance. For intimacy. Community. Its goes on and on. They all point to love. And unfortunately, we stuff that hunger with temporary fixes. We all do it. Us 'Mericans love our quick fixes! Its silly that most of us even know what will satiate that hunger... but continue to search and stuff.
So as "Christians", or as I prefer, "Christ Followers", we are called to Love. Unconditionally. Man that's easier said than done. Love hurts sometimes. A lot of times. Love has to do with putting others first. Way first. And a lot of times love can be hidden, or hard to see or feel. And sometimes love hurts to receive, like being confronted by a friend about a problem. But Love is not passive. If love was passive, God would not have come to this earth in bodily form to lay down his life for us.

I've been reading Erwin McManus's "Soul Cravings" this week. Go to amazon.com, splurge $10 on this amazing book. Its helping everything to make sense to me.

So I guess I'm a little behind on my Catholic News, but I heard we got some new deadly sins!! Way to go Pope, give us more rules! Condemn those silly scientists for seeking cures! Condemn those who take birth control! Wow. Really? There are a lot of days I'm glad I'm not Catholic. And apologies to any of those who are, no offense intended. I just feel like someone is missing the point.

Sorry, a lot of this is scatter brained and (dare I say) "religious". Some of this is just stream of thought. Most of this is just venting. Hope something in here makes sense to someone.

Disturb Us.

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

attributed - Sir Francis Drake -1577

I am entirely unable to read this whole thing and sit still.

Facebook is watching...

Does it freak anyone else out that there is a single database located somewhere within the states that contains a massive amount of their personal information? Assuming you have an account with them. I mean, a massive amount of people are even smart enough to give facebook their phone number. They've got all your demographics and track so many of your moves. They know so much more about you than you know about them.
Get this:
Facebook had a program for a while called "Beacon". Not Bacon. This program tracked your online purchases (if you granted it the initial permission, which you may have even done not knowing). It would see what you purchased at specific sites, like Amazon (which I'll get to later). Anywho, while Facebook still had this program, a man purchased a diamond ring at such a site. At that time, all his friends and his girlfriend all had on their news feeds "*Insert dudes name* Has Purchased This Diamond Ring". So basically all his friends and his girlfriend saw and knew that he was going to purpose. Screwed. Some surprise, eh? Nice one Facebook.
So this is pretty horrible. But its even more horrible on the large scale of things. Facebook is watching.
Sites like Amazon that track your purchasing history can also have some dirt on you. They will take your purchases and searches and be so kind as to recommend things to you based on people with similar purchases and searches. I guess this small thing isn't a huge deal, but this sort of information is often traded to other companies and crap like that.
Also, they also hold all your credit card information if you store it on their site. One database break in and some l337 haxxor has all the info they need to be you in cyber world.
My Cyber Security teacher asked us at the beginning of the year, "Are you paranoid about your online security?". He insisted that by the end of the semester we would be.
So I have begun to question, is the info I put on Facebook and on this blog information I wouldnt mind the entire world having? I mean, Google attempted to purchase Facebook at one point. Microsoft did successfully purchase like 1% or something for like $200 million or something, but can you imagine all your information available to a major corporation? It may seem harmless to you now... but I urge you to consider the information you've released. I dont know. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

or maybe you're not paranoid enough yet.

haha, I dont even know. Its like 3:08 a.m. and I'm not getting any search queries from ChaCha, so this is what happens. Late night ramblings of an internet addict.