increase love

I haven't blogged in a while. and this isn't an apology. I blog when I am moved to blog. I've been distracted and busy lately so I haven't had much chance for movement. but i think im finally moved now, so im going with it. it's 2:13am and i'm pretty tired. but im going with it.
so while i've been distracted and busy, or more specifically: this past week, I've been thinking about love. it may have started a while back (three weeks ago) when i watched moulin rouge and realized that I could be a part of the bohemian revolution (or revowution. whichever you prefer), but my thoughts on love have intensified in this past week (to the point of movement, obviously). so first i'll just state some preliminary thoughts/beliefs i've gathered in my 17 years about the mystery of love. love is not a feeling. happiness is a feeling. it often accompanies love, but not always. instead, love is an action, a verb. it is the perfect method of relating to fellow humans. love is selfless and sacrificing, making the recipient of your love the priority. and love does not worry whether the same is returned. so basically, im just paraphrasing corinthians 13:4-8. hey, thats worthy of a block quote (its not like i dont have all morning).
love is patient. love is kind. it is not jealous. love is not pompous, it is not inflated. it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. love never fails.
that's an action-packed word if i ever saw one. so obviously, God is Love. and God loves me. in that love, God created me and gave me free will to love God back. that's what heaven is: to be in complete unison with God through love. well, thats half of it. in our free will, i am also called to love the Creator's Creation. all of it. not just the parts that benefit me or that like me, but the whole (insert favorite cliche here). And in heaven, God and all of Creation (including me) will be in unison through love. (not unlike the buddhist concept of nirvana) so how about now. before heaven. between being created and being in heaven is the time slot reserved for my life in this physical universe. (not to bother with the worrisome details and specifics of what exactly the process is of being received into heaven. thats a mystery to be lived, not anticipated) so this life is my opportunity to love God with my free will. and Creation. all of it. but i will never experience all of God's Creation in my lifetime. and love is an intimate behavior. thats a source of some of my thoughts right there. how to love all of creation without ever even meeting most of it til heaven. my answer (to my own question) is that it is a matter of attitude and faith. that all i can do is love the creation i encounter as best i can (attitude), trusting that i would be able to do the same with the rest of it (faith). in reflecting, i see that heaven is a complete love. love, on my part and while in this universe, is incomplete. i love parts of creation more than others. i love humans more than i love plants because i have more in common with humans. thats another question: can love (my human attempt to love) actually have different degrees or intensities? i'll save typing and assume for now that the answer is yes. (knowing that assuming is bad for obvious word splicing reasons) so love of different degrees is the reality in this imperfect world. but it is not the goal. complete love (heaven) is the goal. and my life should be used by coming as close to that goal as possible. so say i observe myself loving one person more than another. i want to see how i love that person more and increase my love for the other person in the same manner. this of course has boundaries such as marriage, but if there are ways to increase my love for another person, i need to try to do that. this is very idealistic of me, but none of this love can depend on the other person or their actions regarding me. i must love indiscriminately and recklessly. God (aka love) is my first priority (redundant?) in increasing my love. Creation second. me third. yeah, im still in there as a recipient of my love. i need to increase love for myself too. but way too often, i switch that priority paradigm to have me on top and God on bottom. i might even say most of the time. and that is because i judge priority with my level of intimacy to whatever it is that im focusing on. and simply because God is not physically next to me, i often dont focus or pay enough attention to God. since i hopefully know myself best (of the people i know, i mean. God knows me perfectly), I often put priority on my needs/wants, being most intimate with those needs and wants. then putting the people around me as second priority because i feel more intimate with their wants and needs than Gods will. in the past few months i have tried to use this as a way to become more intimate with God. to become closer to God by becoming closer to other people. it is not a bad thing to do at all, but it cannot be the only thing. because i can become easily distracted with these people and lose any focus on God and any energy to be directed towards loving God goes only to the people around me and to me. (i realize im being awfully hard on myself. this is not the intent. it is only a process of reflecting and resetting my attitudes and behaviors) so if judging priority by intimacy does not work, the judgement must be made by level of commitment. obviously my foremost commitment should be to God and to the doing of God's will to most fully love Creation. and my second commitment to creation. to love it as God will's me to. and my third to myself because i only need commit myself to doing the first two things. but within the second commitment to creation-again, it is an unevenly distributed commitment in my humanness. the most obvious example is if i were to marry, i'd have a stronger commitment to my wife than to a close friend, quite logically. it seems i'd be called to love my wife most among humans, being a part of me. what then of increasing my universal love? its hard for me to wrap my mind around these expansive ideas and im quite tired (being 3:56am) so i'll stop that point there. but basically, i'm realizing that all i have to do is increase love and the rest is details. i suppose the details are important and apparently someone once said that God is in the details. but ive never liked focusing on the details. even though thats probably all that i ever do. nitpicking about vocations and such. as my yg sang in our PL skit-all you need is love.