Agape - No Strings Attached

just watched 13 going on 30: Jennifer Garner is gorgeous...her smile literally lights up her face from pretty to something luminous and joyful. Too bad the movie was kind of a cop-out. Personally, I liked it when Mark Ruffalo chooses to go ahead and marry his fiance because he realises that "we cannot just turn back time." It would have been a mature unHollywood ending to close the film with the scene of Garner embracing her childhood dollhouse under the drifitng autumn leaves, pensive, grown-up and realising she must move on. Instead, indeed time is turned thanks to literal magic dust and tadah - Garner and Ruffalo get married.

It's like the ending Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke's characters wished they could have had in Before Sunset. Loved that movie for how real it was in the moments of genuine regret and pain that emerged in the conversations between the two.

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slightly off tangent but along similar threads of unrequited love, the movie made me think about this article I read earlier in the year. It has been one of the best articles i have read about one of the big problems that plague christian singles.

Agape - No Strings Attached
By Lia Fuller O'Neil

"Love. It's such a simple word. And such a complex emotion. Even when we desire to love in a simple, uncomplicated way, love has a way of twisting itself back on us, catching us unawares. It's not easy to keep the different kinds of love, the different kinds of relationships, in their proper contexts. Even when we desire with our whole hearts to pursue love it is often very difficult to keep from falling in love....."

My favourite part: of the article:
"...The key to the solution of this problem lies not in our fighting the fact that we love someone, not in trying to love less in order to get back to phileo but in trying to love more, to get beyond eros to agape, the kind of love the Lord has for us. The exciting and beautiful thing about agape love is finding out that you truly can love someone very deeply and yet allow him complete freedom to respond to you in whatever way God leads him to respond...."

That really set off a minor epiphany for me.

One of those "I knew it all along, but I needed someone else to say it, before it suddenly clicked and cemented itself for real" moments. Part of me thinks it would have been great to have read this when I was in junior college and university when we understand so little about what love means.

Still, part of me also thinks it was precisely only because God let me struggle to find my own answers all those years that I understand and embrace fully what the article is talking about.

Some answers have to be lived through rather than merely read I guess.
Not all of us live in a Hollywood movie with magic dust to turn back time. :)


Current music:
Foo FIghters' Walking After You.
really mellow, really quietly romantic for a bunch of rather simple almost simplistic lyrics.
Must be the gorgeous guitar.