Love Anyway

How do you respond to an extravagant gift?  Are you overwhelmed with gratitude or apprehensive that the gift is too generous to repay.  Maybe a little of both?  Me too.  Our response to a gift is the key to lasting love.

Much has been made of the distinction between loving and being in love.   Since my teens I’ve heard people say that love is a verb.  I got the concept; Elaine and I discussed it early in our courting, but it took a crisis for the truth of it to make a difference in our relationship.  It took a crisis on our honeymoon.

In pre-marital counseling we were told that being in love was a conditional feeling that would naturally wax and wane.  This was countered with unconditional love; we could choose to behave lovingly regardless of feelings.  I thought this was a great way of looking at it.  “Luckily”, I thought, “we don’t need the sacrificial, no-feeling-just-give-anyway kind of love because we have romance”.

The stuff that older couples said would have bothered us if we believed that our love was anything akin to theirs.  They spoke of being in love as if it were a season, a stage we would grow through.  Romance would burn bright and reduce to comforting embers before sputtering completely at age 40.

Younger couples were confusing as well.  It would be foolish t believe that we were not affected by our generation.  If we were not soldiers in the sexual revolution we certainly lived in the battle zone.  A phrase repeated at many wedding ceremonies epitomized popular belief, “As long as we both shall love”.  I understood this to mean that they saw love as just a feeling, and that staying together after the feeling was gone would be downright dishonest.

We were very intentional during the three and a half years we dated.  Our backgrounds, expectations, and styles were poles apart. We talked, we interviewed couples we admired, and we sought pre-marital counseling in order to prepare ourselves.  We are really glad we did; but reality hit anyway.

Some may have been in it for the duration of warm fuzzy feelings but I knew I was in it for life. Elaine had lived with little protection or comfort and I planned to set that right whether the romance endured or not.  We had looked forward to the wedding so that we could declare our vows before God, friends, and family; and then get on with life together.  It may have been emotional weariness after the ramp up to the wedding or any number of other triggers that led to the crisis.  The fact was that one moment I was ecstatic to finally have the official pronouncement of our bond. The next I was numb, devoid of every feeling but dread that I would forever remain numb.  I knew I loved her and I knew I was in it for life.  But the numbness terrified me.

I took my problem to my friend Cliff, a pastor who had already been married a decade.  He walked me down the familiar path of Ephesians 5, showing me the mandate to behave lovingly and sacrificially without regard to feelings.  He then assured me that if I relaxed and behaved lovingly that the feelings would follow.  He gave me permission to act out love whether I felt it or not.  This began to work immediately, first because I stopped panicking, and then because I began to experience love that was focused on giving rather than on feelings.

Giving without regard for what I got in return was the right answer and the right thing to do.  It worked, and has continued to work for more than 30 years.  The affection, the romance, I feel today is logarithmically greater than it was in the beginning.  The formulas attractiveness was increased by my desire to be the guy in shining armor that made the world safe my wife. But I have come to see the formula as incomplete.

The formula as I lived it was this; do all that you can to meet your wife’s needs, or direct her to the one who can meet those emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual needs. The result was an ever-increasing affection.  This was added to by the truth that I have never out-given Elaine so the system fed itself.  Of course, there have been more times than I care to admit here that I have behaved selfishly; believing that I had given enough and it was time to receive.  Entitlement is an enemy of love.

I became unsatisfied with this recipe for a few reasons.  It became apparent after a while that I had set myself up to heroically protect Elaine from pain.  I had foolishly tried to take on a role that only God is up to.  In the process I stepped between them a few times; which bears all the comforts of being between hammer and anvil.  Second, I must admit that while I was motivated to give sacrificially because it was the right thing to do, I was also focused on the dividend of feelings.  Third, and most importantly, I believe the formula is incomplete.

For years I saw loving this way as an act of obedience.  I also saw it as being a transaction between Elaine and I.  Both of these fall short. 

I have received an extravagant gift in that God has unconditionally loved me.  In response to that gift, I have believed that I must give my obedience.  So I do the right thing and give to my wife.  She will or won’t respond in kind.  I will or won’t be consistently obedient.  This is not the only area of life that has been affected by my incomplete understanding of the gospel.

The gift, the gospel (good news), is that God came to earth as Jesus to live the life I could not live, accept the punishment I deserve, and invite me to be in relationship with Him forever.  My response to that gift has been an attempt to be worthy of it, which is another way of trying to earn it.  When I think this way I say, “I am loved therefore I must love”.

The distinction may seem subtle, but it makes all the difference when I respond to the gift, “I am loved therefore I can love”. When I see the gospel as a huge, beyond reciprocation and beyond earning, I can only respond with humility and gratitude.  This gratitude engenders affection for the giver, and being loved it provides an abundance from which to give.   In short, gratitude for God’s love allows us to love more like he does.  We have experienced it and are then able to love less conditionally.   When we get grumpy and entitled, believing the balance of giving to be off, we can be reminded that the strength to love does not come from our mate, but from our maker.

Here’s my newer improved formula.  You are loved, be grateful.  The person you chose isn’t perfect? Love anyway. Love the way you are loved, you don’t deserve it either.  Repeat, feelings to follow.  Don’t rush them, they’re a gift.