Sometimes, I guess you have to care about someone enough to let them take themselves out of your life. You can't force somebody to care about you, because that's their responsibility. True love is the love that Jesus Christ has for us. It is a Spiritual Gift that cannot be attained by the natural man, but only through the power of the atonement, as a gift from our Savior. We are incapable of truly loving others without first loving Him. Through loving God, we are filled with the Spirit, and become capable of loving other people. That's why He commands us to love Him--because otherwise, we wouldn't be able to truly love each other. Thus, any righteous, loving relationship is merely an extension of the relationship we have with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ loves us because he chooses to, not because we earn it. Our love can only be real and true if it is a choice as well, otherwise, it is just lust and infatuation; fickle, flighty, chemical, ephemeral. The difference between love and lust is agency. You don't have to choose to lust; that's natural. Love is harder than that, and because Christ has chosen to love everyone, there isn't anyone that doesn't deserve our love. If love is a choice that you are in control of, and everyone deserves your love, then I guess the selection of who you choose to be in relationships with (all levels of true friendship and relationship) depends on the trust you have that that person will be able to choose to love you. Maybe it takes some hard, rough, uncomfortable introspection to decide to be worthy of that trust. But if not, any love that was learned and chosen, even if not reciprocated, was worth your time. There is no better indication of the quality of our character than how much we choose to love those we can trust.
Without the ability to choose, water takes the path of least resistance, sometimes only to the ends of being dammed up in stagnant pools before ever reaching its goal. Our gift of agency allows us to choose things that are hard-- paths full of resistance-- so we can overcome our natural instincts and inclinations to take the easiest way. What it means to be an agent is to have the faith to choose what you know is right even and especially when you don't want to. It is good to make hard choices and risk our own comfort in order to reach our destinations. People are more than the way they make us feel. One of the hardest choices for me is to forget the way that people make me feel, and worry about the way I make them feel. That sounds a lot like love.
Oh, let the rain fall down and wash this world away. Oh, let the sky be gray. 'Cause, if it's ever gonna get any better, it's gotta get worse for a day.
