Here is love.

Love is dreaming of a colleague's participation in the wedding feast of the Lamb and waking up to a morning, quite despite the blustery ice cold mountain wind, that remained radiant with sunbeams of hope.

Love is giving a classroom full of students a chance to correct a quiz that was collectively failed miserably, and noticing with a surprising tenderness and joy that a significant number of them had dimples.

Love is fighting an internal boxing match against all the fear and rage and loss and selfishness inside of you to plan pizza parties and ask the right questions all the while steadying yourself to give and welcome and wave at students who shout your name from third floor windows.

Love is letting your heart weep over students who bear histories of poverty and abuse while at the same time mustering up the courage to genuinely thank them for erasing the board and coach them through the snarls of English pronunciation.

Love is having lunch with a Korean sister, whose heart uncannily mirrors your own in a way that is like a breath of life you've been gasping for, and sharing the lessons we've learned from the hand of our Father that can only be explained by experience in this valley of death while our eyes water over and our voices shake.

Love is drinking a thermos of sweet tea washed down with a bowl of soupy noodles followed up with a thermos of butter tea all the while memorizing the twinkles and lines that appear on a dear friend's face when she insists that after I leave her only hope for the time until I must return is that it would pass quickly.

Love is knowing there's nothing in your bag that the wide-eyed, dusty-haired beggar child with the crusty nose, bloated belly, and thin legs could want and allowing him to take out anything he can find anyway.

Love is bending close to the grandmother who had been edging towards you at the bus stop and allowing yourself to become her cane as she mutters at you in a dialect you can't really make out and helping her onto the bus as though she were your own.

Love is being followed into your home by the multiplying numbers of neighborhood children and making them wait in line with tiny cupped hands that you can fill with m&m's from a jar, which like the widow's oil, never seems to empty.

Love is splitting an orange with a student who talks too quickly and making him look in your eyes to see the undiluted confidence in him and his future success as you allow both his excitement and yours to become a palpable presence in the room and the air tingles with expectation as the days towards graduation draw near.

Love is living in a place that consistently alarms and abuses you, a place that you can confess in truth and ample experience to being absolutely awful, a place whose pain has become an intimate throbbing wound of your own... and yet choosing to allow every moment that passes to draw you deeper into it, absorbing the richness of blessing that can only be found when the green pastures and still waters seem like a figment of a dream, and cursing the very ticking of the clock that counts down to your departure which you hold so dear.

Love is here... and it's complicated.