Dear Journal,
Sweep past all the prepositions, and you’re left with this:
Since, then, you have purified yourselves through obedience, unto brotherly love,
Love.
Because love lasts.
Because [only] love lasts.


This morning, a clean but sparsely furnished room on the third floor overlooking a bustling street in Harare. (Bustling even at 0100, 0200, and 0300 in the morning. Yeah. Don’t ask me how I know.)
Yesterday, Most of the day in the clouds in an Emirates A340. Sleeping. (Yeah… Again, don’t ask.)

The day before that, an all-day, all-zones pass to the world’s longest metro in my pocket, a brother with big ideas at my side, and miles on foot through unutterable opulence, at 100 degrees.
And this moment?
And all along the silky-smooth metro track suspended above the endless construction zone that is a playground for the uberwealthy? And past 7 star hotel, and out to the end of the palm, and beside blue glass reaching up towards heaven, and surrounded by the mist of a fountain synchronized with song? (Perhaps the only cool spot outdoors in all of the emirates?)
This thought:
It’s all going to go. All of it. Either a hundred dessert summers will take their toll, and the luster will fade, or, (and much more likely) the world will wrap up before the building is even finished…
Only. Love. Lasts.

“Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently: Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.” 1 Peter 1:22-25