I give that disclaimer because my greatest failure is to love people. I don’t love people enough, I mean. I cut off the people who hurt me. I hurt the people who help me. I look self-righteous when I speak my mind, and I regret not saying anything when someone needs to be understood. I find it difficult to forgive people who give me mixed signals and apologize. I’m heartless enough to wish people would leave me alone when we’ve exchanged our prophetic messages instead of clinging to a companionship that has run its course. I pray for love to flow through me, and I clog myself with resentment and bitterness and self-discovery.

Someday I’ll write books, and people will leave reviews on Amazon in the one-star section saying they knew me, and I wasn’t a good friend. They’ll be right. I just hope people will hear what I have to say and exercise it better than I could.

I don’t have this idea practiced. Neil Gaiman said it’s a fool’s prerogative to speak the truth, and I seek to do that. Maybe I’ll speak the truth to someone who can follow it better than I, a fool of a messenger.

Right.

So here’s the idea.

God is love, and the first and second commandments are to love God and to love my neighbor. My neighbor is everybody, especially the people I’ve been trained to view (Huck’s Lesson) as less worth my time than those who are like me (colors of the wind).

Loving other people breaks the bridge to Love, or the Infinite One. If I don’t love God, I can’t love people. And if my God-time takes precedence over caring for people, it becomes me-time. So love breaks through to love. Maybe I fake it until I make it. Or maybe I need to stop trying so hard, because when I’m trying to focus and pay attention to people and finding reasons to appreciate and like them, love is easier.

Welcome to my mind. It’s full of self-doubt and trying to comprehend the infinite just enough to practice it a little. I’m sorry I wasn’t the friend I tried to be. All I know is love is out there, because I’m loved when I don’t deserve it. You’ll find it by asking God to love you, and by loving people when you don’t feel like it.