Sometimes it feels like the message was written especially for me. Today's podcast was an archived marriage series at Bent Tree. The crux of the message was "what is love?". Pastor Pete spoke about how love is in the demonstration.........show it instead of say it.
During the sermon, Pastor Pete shared this teenager's Facebook declaration:
"My love life will never be satisfactory until someone runs through
"My love life will never be satisfactory until someone runs through
an airport to stop me from getting on a flight."
As a response to that sentiment, he shared this post from Lisa-Jo Baker's blog:
He’s never run through an airport for me.
But I’ve never drowned holding onto his hand.
There is a rumor, an urban myth, a fiction, a fantasy, a black and white screen cliché that love looks like the mad, romantic dash through airports for a last chance at a flailing kiss. And then the credits roll. And the lights come on. And we must go back to our real lives where we forget that love really lives.
He’s never run through an airport for me.
He’s gone out for milk at 10pm, he’s held our children through bouts of stomach viruses and told me there is nothing about his kids that disgusts him. He’s carried us on his shoulders when we were too tired or too sad or too done to keep doing the every day ins and outs that make up a life. He’s unloaded a hundred loads of laundry and put the dishes away. He lays down his life and it looks like so many ordinary moments stitched together into the testimony of a good man who comes home to his family in the old minivan, the one with the broken air conditioning. It undoes me every time to look around and find him there, having my back in the day to day and the late night into late night and then next year again. He’s run a thousand times around the sun with me and we hold hands and touch feet at night between the covers even when we’re wretched and fighting we’re always fighting our way back to each other.
He’s never run through an airport for me.
He is patient and kind. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And we come running to him. When the battered white minivan pulls into the driveway his children trip over themselves, their abandoned Crocs and the pool bag to be the first to open the door and spill out their day into the hands of the man who can catch them.
He’s never run through an airport for me.
This ordinary unremarkable love walks slowly every day alongside. One step, one day, one T-ball practice at a time. One permission slip signed, one Lunchable, one school play, one art project, one Lego box, one more night time cup of water delivered at a time. This ordinary love that wakes up with crease marks on its cheeks and is the daily bread that sustains across time zones and countries and cultures and the exhaustion of trying to figure out how to be a parent and a grown up and somebody’s forever. And this is a love life – to live life each small, sometimes unbearably tedious moment – together. To trip over old jokes and misunderstandings. To catch our runaway tongues and tempers and gift them into the hands of the person who was gifted to us. He lets me warm my ice cold feet between his legs and the covers at night.
He has never run through an airport for me.
This is love with the lights on and eyes wide open. This is the brave love, the scared love, the sacred boring, the holy ordinary over sinks of dirty dishes and that one cupboard in the kitchen with the broken hinge.
As Pastor Pete read from Lisa-Jo Baker's blog, I found myself sitting at a red light with tears running down my cheeks and the driver in the lane next to me looking at me like I had three heads. :)
This post describes my sweet husband to perfection. I'm reminded daily that there is nothing ordinary about our love. It defies the odds and I am so lucky that it does. This man came into our lives at the perfect time and provided such unconditional love that I'm truly humbled. Although he says "I love you" daily, he shows his love a thousand times a day.
Jim: I love you more than words can say.
I can only pray my actions do the job instead.
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