You can spend the whole christmas season looking for comfort and satisfaction through gifts, people, idols, etc yet never feel satisfied, only longing for more. On the other hand there is Christ, our savior who will love, satisfy and comfort to an end far beyond our understanding. I’m thankful for that.

I’ll preface and say that I am a autodidact, I enjoy teaching myself. 

I have a massive insecurity of approval among my peer group. I cannot figure as to why. I have no problem interacting with people older than me, in fact, I’ve flourished among them at work and in personal relationships. What I can’t understand however, is that despite the realization of this, I can’t act upon it.

Lately I often have experiences lasting hours where my brain spins and runs uncontrollably. Moving from one topic to the next, I can’t settle. I typically enjoy these spells in the right context. I’m enthralled by deep thought, learning and thinking are becoming my favorite activities. A recent topic of these has been personal interaction, which has always been fascinating to me, as I’m not quite the best at it.

I’ve lately been particularly observant of how us people interact. Greetings, conversation, education, body language, anything. What I’ve found among many people who have a great capacity to engage in conversation easily, is the near instant discovery of an affinity they share with the person they’re speaking to. Once this is established they use it as a catalyst to move into further conversation. This is all great, I continued to study and think about what it is to be a good communicator. I observed what it was to truly care about the person you were engaging with, how to find topics they were passionate about and were interested in. What really separated good communicators from poor, I’ve found, is how they engage in the other people, not how eloquent or interesting they themselves could come across.

I began to engage in conversation with all of my concluded thoughts in mind. What I found was that I nearly always stressed to heavily on what observations I collected were being used in the conversation than the conversation itself. The problem is that I can’t shake this, worse yet, it occurs more often among people my age. Couple this with an insecurity for approval, I implode socially. 

Today I realized I’m going about it wrong. What I really wanted, was to be more like Jesus. Jesus is the son of God, and God is love. To be more like Jesus I needed to be like love, and love costs. It’s not a one way street. While my observations and conclusions were a great starting place, to really engage with someone, to really care, is to love. While I’ve realized this, it’s still difficult to live it out. To do this, I need to study the Bible, the living word of God, more importantly so than people in my life.