A while back my wife’s cousin sent me a card she had found
in her mothers things after she passed away. It was a birth announcement from
seventy some years ago. It was the announcement that my wife’s mother sent out,
shortly after the day my wife was born. I put it in a drawer with several other
mementoes from her life but it and one other thing seemed to draw my attention
back to the drawer. That other thing was her obituary. I had here in my hands
the beginning and the end of a human life. The alpha and the omega if you will.
I could only think how blessed I was to have been a witness to all of those
years in between.
To those of you just starting out in married life and believing
you’re so in love let me tell you something about love. Let me tell you how it
really evolves between two people. True love can make you a better person
because as James Baldwin said,” Love
takes off masks we fear we can’t live without and know we can’t live within.”
Yes true love can bring out the real you. 1st Corinthians tells us, “Love is patient. Love is kind, it does not
envy. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.”
Think of any other emotion that can lay claim to that. Love always makes you a
better person because it always comes via a barter system. You give it--you get
it back,. It’s the one thing in life we seem to have an insatiable appetite for
and we can’t get or give enough of it. Paul McCartney said, “ And in the end, the love you take is
equal to the love you make.”
When you truly love someone it will bring you happiness, yes,
but it also can bring on fear, for you are afraid of getting hurt and get hurt
you will, as I was when she died but its not that hurt that we need to fear.
It’s the feeling that somehow now, we are incomplete without each other because
believe it or not as the years went by you grew together as surely as trees in
a clump. Not grew up together as in matured together, rather I am trying to say
you just become one together. In
my life it was the fact that we were a team, a George and Gracie, who cracked
each other up with laughter or a Ferranti and Tiecher who made such sweet music
together. We finished each other’s sentences and always knew what the other was
thinking. But you learned too that through living together you saw each other’s
flaws also; even though you were seeing the world though rose colored glasses. You
also learned that perfect people don’t exist, except in the movies but regardless,
he or she became in real life the perfect one for you.
I found that even when the object of your affections dies, love
never dies a natural death with it. For a while we just don’t know how to
replenish it. But grief is like a scab in your heart that hides the wound you
suffered, while underneath it all, blessed healing is taking place. And then
one day that ugly scab falls off and there it is-- all good again. Love can’t
exist in a scab but it’s patient and as 1st Corinthians said “it will persevere” and it will exist
in your heart again if you let it with no fear of seeming fickle. Maybe you
didn’t know what you were missing until it was gone but now you know what to
look for the second time around. You also know that he or she is giving you
something precious that you can break. Yes, love needs to be handled carefully
for you have already found out how fragile it really is.
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