Well it's Valentine's Day. And this morning as I was sipping on coffee and doing the routine perusing of Facebook and Instagram feeds, I saw the flowers, the chocolates, the date nights, the extravagant gestures and it was all very heart-warming. Then I stumbled across this status update from a man
who has been walking out this marriage thing with his wife for longer than I have been alive, and I felt the tears sting and the ache in my heart over love so good.
“Today I was playing Mr Mom, cleaning up the kitchen, vacuuming the carpet, mopping the kitchen and dining rooms. Sat down in my chair and looked over to see Lu laying on the couch, her arm in a sling holding her broken arm in place with tears in her eyes. First thot was that her arm was hurting but when I questioned her she was weeping because I was having to work so hard and she was concerned about my back. An amazing lady!!!”
Six years into a friendship and almost three years into a marriage, I have changed, Daniel has changed… our worlds have been turned upside down by each other many times. We are two deeply layered, differently wired, intricately unique individuals trying to maneuver life and parenting, romance and our faith, all the while with this thing tying our hearts together, bouncing between us, molding us into one.
I can’t share the five steps to better communication (because ours needs a lot of work), I can’t tell you the three things that make our marriage perfect (because it’s far from it), and I can’t write about laying the foundation of faithful service and honor and respect because we are only just shy of three years in and still laying and building into our own foundation. But I can tell you that the status update above painted a sweeter picture of the kind of love that has seen us this far and the kind of love that will see us further, than anything else I’ve seen on social media today.
On a holiday when “love” is splattered across social and commercial media and quantified by material (also super fun) expressions, I am reminded that love is so much more. Yes, I am all about chocolate and flowers and candlelit dates. But more than that, I want to celebrate love: the kind of love that lasts years and weathers storms, that takes care of puking babies together and works even longer hours to make the ends meet, that chooses humility in the middle of an argument and takes out the trash for the millionth time, that makes midnight runs to buy diapers or chocolate (thinking here of things my Daniel has done time and again). These are real, tangible, sacrificial expressions of our love that made up real, honest, sacred moments of our marriage over the last year. I want to celebrate those things today. I want to celebrate those oh-so-small but oh-so-extravagant gestures today.
This morning, I reread a blog post by Ann Voskamp that really reset my heart for a day celebrating love. In it she writes, “Maybe at first we only stumble into love with the idea of someone because the real falling in love with a person takes years — the long, slow fall off the edge of control and into eternity… Falling in love with the idea of a person is ideally the beginning to living out love with that person for always.,, Real love has no need of adjectives to describe it — because love is a verb that does… Yeah, let all the lovesick beats be cranked up right loud and let them play their songs and play at love — And let a whole bunch of us grow old in this romance of conscious covenant coupling that has our souls mingling late into our sacrificing twilight… The idea of the person we fall in love with, can become our ideal person.”
Today, I am grateful for love that has been there in the bright, happy places and the hard, dark places. I am grateful for love that has given me the freedom to fail and be myself and loved more than the idea of me. And I’m grateful for the grace of God in us that fights for our marriage even when we both fall short.
Happy Valentine’s Day Daniel. Here’s to us becoming each other’s ideal, to the kind of love that serves, the kind of love I hope we are falling into, the kind of love I hope our boys grow up seeing and that they find themselves. I love you.
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