Love You Always and Forever

This week I was able to have a great conversation with my son about love.  This is another blessing of God's mercy in our circumstances because if we were not where we are at, I don't know if I ever would have had this conversation with him because I hadn't even learned it yet.  So I thank God for this opportunity to share with Tyler what God has taught me about love.

Love you Always and Forever.  That is how my husband and I have always signed our letters & cards to each other.  I actually pulled out a bunch of them the other night just to reread them and I was struck by the love my husband verbalized to me throughout the years.  I showed them to Tyler to let him read them for himself.  It made me smile to remember that we always sign them that way.  That our love was not only meant for always, but forever.  Our love for each was, is, real so what happened?  Our love was a worldly form of a feeling.  And that my friends, is not what love is.

Love is not a feeling.  Love is a choice. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 "Love is patient & 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, believe all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  I can not look at that definition of love and miss how obvious it is that I need to chose those things.  I need to choose to give up my own way, I need to choose to be patient & kind, I need to choose to rejoice in the truth!  You don't lose love or "not love someone anymore", you chose to stop walking in love.  Love doesn't run out when things are hard or give up.  Love is a choice to endure all things. 

As a culture, we are so caught up love being this beautiful, tingly, feeling that makes me feel good.  I either feel it or I don't.  How deceived we have all become!  Love is not suppose to be about how I feel or what I want or what someone else can do for me.  Love is about ME choosing to SERVE another for THEIR good.  In our sinful & selfish desires of our flesh we forget that the greatest example of love was God giving His own Son up to die on a cross for us! 1 John 4:10 "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins" If that isn't proof that love is about giving & serving rather than receiving, I don't know what is. 

I also explained to Tyler that there was a huge problem with the way that my husband & I loved each other.  And that is, we loved each other first.  We are called by God to love Him above anyone or anything else. Matthew 22:37-38 " you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment"  If you miss that first step, everything under it is built on the wrong foundation.  I did not love God more than husband.  And if I'm being completely honest, I kinda loved myself more than my husband too.  So Me, Husband, God, kids, etc.  And God was watching me live that everyday!  By shaking up my world, he has finally fixed the order so that I am living the way God designed it.  God, Husband, kids, etc.  Jon was never suppose to be first.  I was never suppose to be Jon's first.  We had it all wrong!  God is always suppose to be first for all of us.  And when we love God first, and are living our lives for Him, everything else falls into place because GOD IS LOVE.  When you choose God, you can choose to unselfishly serve, and love will follow. 1 John 4:7-8 "Beloved, let us love one another, for is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.  Anyone what does not love does not know God, because God is love".

Are you missing love?  Searching for love?  Think you've found love?  Think you've fallen out of love?  I beg you to look at the foundation you are basing that on.  Are you setting yourself up for failure before you even start?  When God is the love of your life, when you love God more than there are stars in the sky, then you will truly know love.  I will always sign my letters to my husband with "love you always & forever" and because of God's mercy & grace, those words have never been more true and more meaningful. And now, my children have a tangible and real example of what true love in a relationship looks like.  God is good.