You'll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.

Love is a thousand things, but at the center is a choice. It is a choice to love people. Left to myself, i get quiet and bitter and critical. i get angry. i feel sorry for myself. It is a choice to love people. It is a choice to be kind. It is a choice to be patient, to be honest, to live with grace. i would like to start making better choices.

Our job is to love people. When it hurts. When it's awkward. When it's uncool and embarrassing. Our job is to stand together, to carry the burdens of one another and to meet each other in our questions.

And God must be a pretty big fan of today, because you keep waking up to it. You have made known your request for a hundred different yesterdays, but the sun keeps rising on this thing that has never been known. Yesterday is dead and over. Wrapped in grace. Those days are grace. You are still alive, and today is the most interesting day. Today is the best place to live.

The dream is you never giving up on your story because no one else can play your part.

You are alive tonight for a reason. You were created to love and to be loved. You were not meant to be alone. You are not alone. You were meant to do life with other people. You need people who know you. You need to know people. Your voice matters. We are certainly strong. But we are also certainly fragile.

Nobody gets to name you. You are not forgettable. You are not replaceable. You are not your pain. You are sacred and special and alive.