Love Learning

Even at 58, I’m amazed at how little I know about love. Sad, perplexing, embarrassing—to not be farther along in life, eh? Do you too sometimes feel the same? And yet this is the end goal of life, isn’t it? The whole hope of knowing God is to become a more loving man.

I’m wooed on by the come-this-way Voice of the Spirit. I’m inspired to be more like Jesus as He extends His open arms, immeasurably wide, to me.

Marriage is the ultimate training ground, it seems. The relationship made-in-Heaven that holds up a mirror to ourselves that doesn’t lie. It reveals. Without marriage, we might go our whole lives with no honest confrontation of our ugliness and with no mirror that says, “See here.”

Marriage not only provides the holy opportunity to see in the mirror and not look away but also the opportunity to keep looking and to keep growing in our capacity to love.

Love requires change. Can I become something different, something new, to please another? This week, I’m practicing forgotten courtesies like holding a car door open and putting a toilet seat down. Little things, yes, but they point to a big mindset—to live for another and not myself.

Love moves me:

To ask her before I decide.

To listen to understand more than be understood.

To think proactively about serving her more and more.

To not hesitate when she asks me for something.

To think more deeply and sensitively than I normally would.

To do what she would like to do and to die to my desires.

Truth be told, being other-centered and choosing love is not my natural bent…I know, no surprise. I’m steeped in “me-first.” I’m a practiced master of my own thoughts and live mostly in my own world. And this selfishness is truly boring, with little meaning nor fulfillment and, in the end, pretty lonely.

Love and its calling and challenge to love more jolts me to life and trains me for Heaven.

-Chris