What is Love

Because there is just too much to say after three weeks of not writing here...I am going to tell you about our vacation later.

Today I harvested my herbs and perennials for drying and had deep thoughts about life; thoughts about how prayer works and is often ignored in my life.

I had thoughts about how challenging it is to meet the needs of my "tribe". and how often I miss the need by feeling frustrations toward the problems instead of heeding compassion and kindness for what is really going on to make them tick that way. 

Recently, the kids and I watched a movie that helped me realize the heart of Jesus a little more. I was thinking about the pain and rejection Jesus encountered here on earth trying to communicate God's love to a broken fallen world. When trying to escape the pain and suffering I often find myself in; I realize that this is what Jesus calls me to. This is what living as Jesus means. It means loving back anyway. It means laying aside my hurts and giving the much needed love to the hard to love.

And it is sweat and blood and tears sometimes to love. It isn't easy. It isn't suppose to be. Loving your people (the ones God puts in your life) can sometimes be the hardest thing you will ever do because they don't think about the fact that you wash their clothes and make their food and drive them places and that your heart breaks when theirs hearts break. They have no idea how much time you spend on your tired knees praying for them. They don't see the way your heart expands when they go off to their first full time jobs and parties that do not involve you.

And you don't want them to. You just keep loving them in spite of how much they realize that you are. That's the real stuff. The kind nobody can track or measure or add to. Real love is being spit on and still doing what needs doing. Not that I have been spit on ever. But sometimes my heart feels like I have been spit on and my soul is not as appreciated as I wish it were. That's when its time to really act in love. 

I was asking God how I could do better at loving my husband. (I find it much too easy to see my husband's bad treatment of me above and before his attempts to love me.) So when I asked God that question I was given the thought of looking at my husband with a heart of compassion. 

Not exactly easy, me never being a man...but I have a healthy imagination and I was listening to a song at that moment that was being belted out by a passionate young man who was singing a prayer much like I imagine David in the Bible would have sung. And it kinda crawled right up inside my soul, the passion and prayer for guidance this man was asking of God, and I wondered, "Are these the heart cries my man feels and can't put into words?" 

And so I prayed. I prayed for love and guidance and God's power in my husband's life and mine too. I think that is love; prayer and caring and never giving up.