Happy Valentines..........

Happy Valentines, guys :)

I have a whole bunch to get done today and I've kinda thrown in the blogging towel

but I just keep thinkin about something.

And when I can't shake something, I find this is the place where it usually stays put. 

This picture was taken around 2001. I gave it to my guy for Valentine's that year.

This picture and even the frame was a lie.

There was no love between us. Just a real sour soul tie. A whole lotta bitterness, strife, jealousy, control, abuse, disrespect. Everything that Webster's would define as "anti-love".

But we were livin like most folks. We shared a place, shared a bed, shared meals and did life together. It was miserable, but we were together.

We were two people incapable of love. The harder we tried to emulate the world's version of love the more frustrated and heartbroken we became. I know that for me, staying was a way to cling to the one shining ray of love I had ever experienced or given from my selfish and hardened heart....the little girl who I gave life so that she could be life for someone else.

Emily's life was saved by Love. The love of strangers who worked in a pro-life ministry.

Love was in the eyes and voice of the woman whose face I do not remember, who told me things I had never heard. I do not even remember her words.

 But Love spoke something so deep to me that everything I knew when I callously entered that place was now upside down.

I went home and quit my first job. I didn't need that money anymore.

This baby would live and not die.

So much Love was shone on my heart that day that I put everything damaging down. The baby would have a safe place inside me, beyond that I didn't know.

Love opened my eyes to the harsh reality of our lives and gave me resolve to understand she was not ours entirely. I coasted by on the residue of the love that I felt in that place of ministry and hid myself away from the influence of my former life. When there were merely weeks left until her birth, we were contacted by a woman who "knew somebody".

And with Love, I handed her off......

And Jerome and I had nothing between us but that one act of love.

We stayed together and eventually married. But that one act of love couldn't sustain two hardened hearts and we dissolved. More like exploded. Over everything and everybody.

We were both shattered people, wandering and hurting from so much loss. Utterly disappointed with how empty our lives were and faced with the truth that we destroyed and abandoned every thing eventually. And in our separation and estrangement over two years we both experienced a touch from Love again.

But this time it was not just the residue of someone else's real love. We came face to face with God, whose very nature is love and even calls himself Love. We trusted him, this God who was nothing but a mockery, a rule maker, a taskmaster and at most times a non-issue in our circle.

And how did he ever come through!

 

 We now have a real marriage. We still have moments of bitterness, strife, jealousy, disrespect and all that ugly stuff. We're all selfish by nature. But now we have a revelation of true love.

It doesn't quit. It doesn't stay offended. It doesn't force it's way.

It yields it's rights. It forgives. It perseveres!

Love never fails.

 

Oh yeah.

And Love redeems.

Happy Valentines Day.
:)