Thoughtful Thursdays: Learning Real Love

Ten years ago today, I was celebrating Singles Awareness Day (S.A.D.) as the unlucky RA on duty at P. College, for I clearly had no lovey-dovey plans to celebrate V-Day. Somehow, the few of us unlucky-in-love folks ended up eating “Chinese” food and renting the very romantic (read: terrible) Mel Gibson movie “Signs” (If you’ve never seen it, don’t. All I recall is something about aliens and crop circles… but I digress). I never liked Valentines Day (and yes, if you are a faithful blog reader you will note a pattern… I don’t like many holidays… some call me Scrooge, perhaps rightfully so, but I digress again). Little did I know that I actually spent that SAD day with the same person I am spending it with a decade later. You see, ours was not love at first sight. To tell the truth, I’m not sure when love came. Our story would never make the Hallmark cut...  I can’t even remember the first time we met, but someone may or may not have been dressed as Danny Ford at an awful 80s party… Our second Valentines brought our engagement, which also has no elaborate, sappy story to accompany the event… it was cold and raining… the sole of my shoe split so my feet were soaked and frigid… any well-made plans were more-or-less ruined... I’m not sure, but I think the first time I ever got flowers from this boy was when I was in labor with the Goose... Ours is not a romance novel...And I couldn’t be happier.

I have learned more about real love in the last decade than I ever imagined. At our wedding we heard those familiar words of 1 Corinthians 13:4-8:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things endures all things.

LOVE NEVER ENDS.

And while I have learned much about this amazing love that God has for us, I fear that all too often I have failed at showing it… I have been impatient… arrogant… and quite irritable. Yes, I still have much to learn. Mine is but a poor reflection of this love.  Though I treasure these words and hope to learn from them, I have found our love to be a bit more like the love Paul describes in the third chapter of Colossians… This love of mutual submission (a word we all may be a bit too afraid of and offended by) that binds together, yet sometimes admonishes and has complaints… this love of learning to live together with those who are different and growing together as we learn to live like Christ... this love of forgiveness… THIS is REAL LOVE. Not a romance novel. Not a Hallmark card. This love is work… a constant choice to place another before my own selfish desires... to admit wrongs… to seek forgiveness… to learn patience… to grow together as we grow closer to God... And I wouldn’t trade that for roses and romance any day.

Thank you, Danny Ford, for your patience with my irritable impatience, and for joining me on the journey to live in real love. Here’s to many more decades of it.

young love... 2003

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. ~Col.3:12-15