“…if they are not smiling, make them,” Mother Teresa said. I heard her completely confident words speak in a language I knew deeply as I sat in the basement of a Cathedral feeling close to many, but most specifically to my Jesus. I wonder at this one a lot. “How did I get HERE?” Most of the time it just wraps me in peace and I am swept away in a soft current of the grace that Jesus has left whispering to my heart, and so I have no answer other than the confidence that it is right. This time, I caught the glimpse of your voice. The answer.

you.

Because there is something about this that makes it all different. Something that is real and something that makes me stay here, because I see something in your smile that the rest of the world does not. Stages and masses and hearts and tears and car rides and sleepovers and inside jokes and pushing and pulling and dreaming and living. And, you just as you are, well, you…

will make them smile.

Because Jesus loves you just as much as He does Mother Teresa. And Jesus wants them all to smile too.

And I love you.

I am so incredibly blessed. So incredibly in love with Someone so beyond me. I am first loved, though, and fall deeper in love with the beat of an eternal heart because it beats within me. And, because, above all, love never fails. Seek first the Kingdom.

…because love wins.