Look what Love has done!

The older I get the more I realize how I am just beginning to understand the nature of love.  I thought that I knew what love meant and understood what unconditional love was all about.  Knowing that I am loved unconditionally by my heavenly Father and that He sent His son Jesus Christ to die for me because He desired so much to have a relationship with me.  ME!  Fully wrapping my mind around that concept sometimes is easier said than done, easier said than felt, easier said than knowing!

I was overwhelmed today while working at the coffee shop during a quiet time. I began to think about the love of God, how He loved me first before I could even love Him.  I started thinking and comparing my relationship with my husband to my relationship with God.  My husband, who is a lover all the way; what some would call a hard core romantic, has been a great model of love for me. He loves to be wherever I am at.  He enjoys just sitting with me and being close.  We don’t have to be doing anything and just the fact that we are in the same room is valuable to him.  Sometimes it drives me nuts because he loves to be with me so much, but it truly is out of a love he has for me.  He tells me all the time how much he loves me, how much he cares for me.  He even writes these crazy cheesy sweet poems on pink princess paper from my daughter’s collection, to tell me how much he loves me.
He tells me he doesn’t ever want me to forget his love for me that’s why he always tells me.  I find out from our customers at our coffee shop and friends, when they ask if I am his wife he always replies, “the pretty one, yeah, that’s her,” with a big smile on his face.

When your dating and first get married its easy to say and do all those things, but a lot of times those things begin to fade away and diminish with time.  So awhile after we were married, I didn’t believe him when he would do all these things and tell me how much he still loved me.  I felt and thought he did it because he had to, that’s what married couples say to each other.  He had now seen every part of me (physically, emotionally, etc.); the good, the bad, and even the ugly!  But that didn’t stop my husband from pursuing me more.  We have had three children, and I have gained weight, lost weight, gone through stressful times financially, hard times spiritually, but throughout it all my husband has loved me MORE!  There is no one else I would rather do life with.  But it took me almost the first 7 years of our marriage to figure it out!

Maybe I had derived my thinking that love fades because I had been rejected by others in the past, maybe because we women already have difficulties with feeling secure, maybe because its hard to fathom that I could still be desirable after all my weaknesses and faults were exposed.  Maybe its too hard to wrap my mind around the concept: someone wants to be with me, more than I want to be with them because the more they’re with me the more I won’t be able to hide who I really am!

But the love my husband has demonstrated to me has messed up my concepts of previously understood love.  His love is greater now than ever before, his desire is for me than ever before, his passion grows more and more daily.  That is the same love of my Jesus!  If I am overwhelmed by the love of my husband for me, which is an earthly and tangible love; how much greater in comparison is the love of my Father for me!  He never gets tired of loving me, he actively pursues me, doesn’t matter what we are doing, as long as it is together.  His love doesn’t fade, it doesn’t lack, but grows deeper, wider, and higher.

Oh, to comprehend more, oh to feel more, oh to love more, to love my Father the way He has loved me.  Nothing compares to love, nothing compares to being desired, nothing is more secure and undeniable than the love of Jesus Christ.