January/February 2003
What Love's Got to Do With It
by Linda Moore
My spouse and I are shut up together in the cluttered office, spilling secrets to a total stranger. The man is a marriage counselor, very highly recommended and by every indication, a world-class listener. He speaks seldom during the hour, but sends us on our way with a pronouncement that feels to both of us almost profound.
"Well," he says, "there certainly has been a lot of wear and tear." Wear and tear. The words are perfect. Each of us and together, we are worn and torn by this relationship that has been the source of no real happiness, no companionship or support.
I am firmly convinced, were anyone to scour the universe, they would be hard pressed to find two people less well-suited.
"How did you and Dad ever get together in the first place?" my 16-year-old asks.
| I am firmly convinced, were anyone to scour the universe, they would be hard pressed to find two people less well-suited. |
"Sex," I do not say; although I want to. Far from God at that time in my life, I not only married a man who did not then, and does not now, know Christ. I readily confused sex with love. There are many cases I could make to my adolescent daughter for chastity till marriage, but one of the most compelling is that ease with which we mistake our passion for the love that founds a marriage.
Placing Blame
Now, twenty-six years later, here I lie, in bed on a Saturday, past midnight. I'm more awake than I have ever been, and livid, listening to the gentle sleeping breath of the man I want to rouse and shake and yell at. I am more furious than I can remember. His cruel words, then silent coldness during the evening have left me in a stunted sputter. I want to scream, "How dare you sleep when I lie here in my great furor, provoked and angry and twelve-noon awake?"
I try to pray, but it's no good. I don't want prayer, I want a fight. I want to say, "I'm right, you're wrong. Admit it. You were horrible to me. Tell me you know it, and that you're sorrier than you have ever been." But I know this husband of mine is more likely to apologize when he is sound asleep than wide awake. "I'm sorry," are not words he speaks.
Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting he's the culprit in this marriage. I am routinely more than willing to sign up for the blame for all that goes awry between us. The greatest area of sin in my life is my behavior in this one relationship. For years I've been unable to sleep, hating myself and agonizing about who I am when I'm with him.
| I can stand there thinking that I can invent it, or I can go directly to the God who is Love, who freely gives to anyone who asks. |
Desperate now, I reach over to the night stand and grab the Bible there. "Dear God, prayer isn't working. I can't settle down enough to pray. Please give me something, anything, from this book. I need to see it written down."
The Bible falls open to Corinthians. The 13th chapter. I have not read it for a long, long time, but I could no doubt rattle off most of it without much trouble. I skim and reach verse four. This love thing is patient and is kind. That alone would turn this marriage on its ear.
I read verse five. Whammo. "It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs." It starts to snowball. Protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres.
Perseveres.
God is Love
Lying here in bed I start to laugh. I stop myself, but still I smile. It's too magnificent. A man sat down somewhere, maybe even late at night, two thousand years ago, and wrote down the precise and precious words that invade my soul tonight. That man was inspired by the Spirit of the living God in order that I, and millions of other I's, could read them -- down through the centuries -- in the middle of the night, and have revealed to them the miracle: God is love.
God is love.
That's it.
That's the whole thing. Not only am I overcome with peace, I'm sleepy. "Good night God. I put this whole thing in your hands tonight and, I hope so much, forever."
And I fall asleep.
And I wake up. Before I've opened up my eyes I am aware that it's a special day. Something's happening today. Oh yeah, I remember. Love. And for that day and for the days and weeks and months that follow, there is love.
Not of my making. Jesus, the author of our faith.
Not of my sustaining. Jesus, the finisher of our faith.
Self-righteous Love
I perceive this man I married with a brand new sensibility. I look at his failings and I know full-well, in a flash, the person I would be without the grace of God. My heart goes out to him. I can graphically imagine what pain it is to attempt a life apart from the Blessed One who gave that life. To be that cut off. That alone.
"I can see you treating me with a lot of kindness lately," my husband volunteers.
| We do not love to get results. This love from God is not some currency we offer to get the things we want. |
I tell the story to a friend. I tell two more friends. While we are to tell of God's mercies, we are to be aware of subtle sins that often threaten any pure intention of our announcements. It is too easy to start out telling of God's grace, and end up with a chorus of "Look at me."
I start to feel a little virtuous, perhaps a tad righteous. "My, aren't I something?" is a thought away. I start hinting to my husband my intention to be Mrs. Long-suffering-forbearance. In the space of a single afternoon, I can move from trusting God for the infusion of his love, to fabricating what I imagine will be a reasonable facsimile. I can even fool myself for fifteen minutes at a time that my fake charity's the real McCoy.
"Your virtue's driving me up a wall," my husband slings back when I appeal to him to meet my attempts at kindness with ones of his own.
Time to head back to 1 Corinthians.
I reread the love part. But wait, there's more. (There's always more. There is not only "a wideness in God's mercy," there is infinite wisdom in his Word.)
"But when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears" (verse 10).
Having reveled in the glimpses of the perfect, I can see full-well the shabby imitation of the part. My part.
"When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me" (verse 11).
And here is the provision for maturity, for growth in grace. God showed me in a miracle what it might be to love. Effortless, quite lovely, satisfying in the most satisfactory sense, I experienced a love for the man who is my husband more substantial than any I had known. But, then everyday comes in. And there's the rub. Real life. Real life rife with spits and spats, and fits and fights, and egos. Minor irritations that become crusades.
It's the real deal vs. the imitation. I'm standing in my kitchen. I need an egg to bake a cake. Two choices: I can try my fiercest to invent one, or I can go to the chicken -- or some intermediary -- for the real thing.
Same with love. I can stand there thinking that I can invent it, or I can go directly to the God who is love, who freely gives to anyone who asks.
"Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror" (verse 12).
I would not presume to pass off my sometimes phony niceness in God's presence, face to face. A poor reflection in a mirror.
I'd always thought that Paul changed the subject once he got to verse ten in 1 Corinthians 13. But God has used these verses to tell me about what love means, about the source, about the sustenance, how it is not done apart from the total and complete surrender and dependence on the love of Christ.
What Love Really Means
As the weeks passed with this understanding and experience changing both my heart and my behavior, my husband seemed to turn and go the other way. He grew even more cross, touchy, easily offended, often angry.
A psychologist friend explains that when one partner's anger ceases, the other's steps up to fill the void. But whatever the dynamic, even with the nastiness abounding, I am living in a state of such uncommon grace. I do not have the ugly nagging burden of the guilt. Love that's given out pervades the giver. My compassion for my husband grows because I know precisely what it feels like to live in those angry shoes, being both the bearer and the receiver of bad feeling.
One more surprising footnote. As I become more deeply involved in the practice of the presence of God, in worship and dependence, I begin to notice fall-out. A man I work with in the church called and blasted me for an article I had published in a magazine he reads. What followed over days were e-mails exploring feelings, old hurts, amazing understandings. The next Sunday I walked into church and with the first glimpse of him, my eyes began to tear. There is a feeling, a rush of love, when you first see a dear friend you have not seen in a long time. That's how I felt when I saw this man. We met and hugged. This new love I now started feeling toward my brothers and sisters in Christ.
In church another Sunday, I had approached a woman with whom I've had a rocky relationship for several years. She has spread rumors, been unkind to me in most creative ways, and told me in so many words, she's hated me.
After the service I run interference till I reach her, holding out my arms, saying that I'd like us to be friends. She responds as if to an affront. No weeping reconciliation here. But that is not the point. We do not love to get results. This love from God is not some currency we offer to get the things we want. It is a gift, an exercise of obedience, and of gratitude and faith, a miracle we can not simulate by our invention, and, most of all, a thing so very pleasing to our God.
Linda Moore is a writer living in Western Massachusetts, the author of a novel and more than a hundred essays and shorter works of fiction.