Have you ever had it where you are insanely busy, but there are thoughts in the back of your mind that seem to continue to ruminate and churn? This has been the case with me. I am usually so busy with never ending homework and obligations that I can hardly keep things together but there is always something brewing in the back of my mind and sometimes I have to find a way to let it out to think it through.
During this churning process, I’ve been thinking about love. Not so much in a romantic sense although that does come into play but just mainly on how wrong the vision I see of it is. Let me explain a little to give you a little bit of a background to my thoughts.
I keep having to read the French novels where the main characters usually end up in a “forbidden” relationship but claim to love each other and give everything because of this idea of love. The result usually is unhappiness and despair. I was working on stuff late this evening at school and heard a rather disappointing revelation about some ideas of love/infatuation or whatever one would define it as. My point is that I keep running into the fake manifestations of love in just about every place I look. It is all anything but what love is.
Love is not found in chivalry. Love is not found in desire for what is forbidden. Love is not merely what is on the exterior. Love is not what I can get from you or vice versa. No, my friend, love is so much deeper, so much more full than anything one can just grasp in a single moment, but at the same time one can grasp it in an instant.
Why do I write this? Because it puts me nearly in tears to realize what others fall for as a figment of love that is not real. When I see, how fake and temporal what they grasp a hold of is, it makes me want to double check my footing and look inside to see if I grasp to something as frail. I want to yell a warning, but will they hear? Will I hear?
This summer I witnessed a scene that I am still struggling to put words to. I feel like an artist in front of a blank canvas trying ever so earnestly to figure out how to paint the picture in his mind. My paint is words, and the canvas is this blank page.
I saw a family shaken by grief but still standing. The small infant they had loved so dearly was born without the breath of life. They had found out just before he was born that it would be so. They had held him in their arms and the tears had fallen down their faces as they knew that they would never hear his cry or feel his warmth. He was gone. The mother walked down the aisle with her family at the funeral clutching the blanket they held him in. Yet, though they were shaken, they were not moved from their foundation. Love upheld them, yet not a love that passes away by each fading fancy. No, this was a love stronger than that. This was a love that upheld David in his times of trouble, that upheld Jeremiah as he preached to a deaf nation, that upheld Hannah as she prayed for a child, that upheld Ruth as she left all to go into a foreign land. This family had tears for their loss but they were not without hope and not without love.
Why the flower? Because there is love in this world that is beyond anything this world can imagine about love. His love found me when I was broken and bound and He only He raised me up to life. He gives me strength. He gives me life. He gives to me the joy of seeing this flower in the morning, but more importantly He taught me what love is.
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