Unfailing Love
One of the most powerful lessons, if not the most powerful, I have learned in marriage and in motherhood is loving my husband and loving my children even when I don’t feel loved by them. This is obviously a very personal topic, but I know that everyone faces this challenge in their life time.
This year Slavic and I will be celebrating our sixteenth anniversary, but it was exactly sixteen years ago this month that he asked me to marry him. I am so glad I said, “Yes!” As in love as we were back then, we love each other even more and are even closer and in tune with each other today. Our love for each other is deeper today, not because we feel more in love, but because we’ve learned to love each other when we didn’t feel like it. Slavic has his own stories to share, I’m sure, but since this is my blog, I’ll share a few of mine.
I mentioned in my previous posts that I grew up in a family of nine children. We had plenty of opportunities to learn how to get along. Looking back on that season of my life, I think we did relatively well. We weren’t perfect. We had some minor misunderstandings and disagreements, but for the most part we truly loved and cared for each other. I can confidently say that we still love and care for each other. Our relationships look different now because most of us are married or are about to get married, which took each of us our own direction. Marriage does that to you, I suppose. I think I’ve had to be more intentional about maintaining my relationships with my siblings after we all got married than I did before. It’s just so easy to feel like we can do without close relationships with our siblings once we marry and start our own families, simply because the need for relationships is satisfied through marriage and we get occupied with our children. However, even the best marriages go through challenges and are tested. Unlike our relationships with our siblings, we can’t just marry out of the need to maintain our marriage. Yes, many do exactly that, but that is not how it should be. The trap many have fallen into is believing that a new relationship is the solution. The truth is every new relationship sooner rather than later becomes another relationship that needs to be maintained.
The times when it was most difficult for me to love Slavic were when he either said or did something that made me feel unloved. In the first few years of our marriage, when this would happen, I would be devastated. I couldn’t believe that someone I loved so much could possibly not love me the way I loved him. As soon as I allowed myself to consider the possibility that maybe, possibly, Slavic didn’t actually love me the way I thought he loved me, the floodgates of accusations and bitterness would swing wide open in my mind. Each thought would build upon the previous thought and before the day was over, I had built a winning case against my husband, complete with a solid opening statement, first witness accounts, conclusion and sentencing with the skill of a top notch prosecutor.
The worst part about this process was that I couldn’t just tell him what was bothering me, I wanted to present my winning case in such a way that he would have no choice but accept every conclusion I made about him. I’m definitely not very proud of my case building skills now. I’ve learned not to accept the possibility that he might not really love me. What is more important is that I’ve realized that I don’t have to depend on whether I feel loved to love. I believe that we resemble our Heavenly Father the most when we love like He loves. He loves selflessly. His love is sacrificial.
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him, should not parish, but have everlasting life. For God DID NOT send His Son into the world to CONDEMN the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
That is what love looks like. How I love this place of scripture when I accept it for myself. When I read it and think about the sacrifice He made, I begin to understand a little bit about how He loves me. Because He loved me, He risked it all. There was no guarantee that I would love Him back, but He did it anyways. I have wondered so many times, why would He go to such measures to love me? I am not a theologian or expert in the scriptures, but the only conclusion I have come to from studying His Word, is that is who He is. He can’t not love. He IS love. That is why when we love others selflessly and sacrificially, we resemble Him the most. It sounds great, but it’s not easy to implement in real life. To be honest, it’s actually impossible to love like God loves by our own strength. The only way we can truly love like that, is if we grow into our identity in Him.
Here’s why I say this: the times when I was the most affected by what Slavic said or did to make me feel unloved were the times when I didn’t make time to fill my heart with God’s Word, spend time in worship and in prayer. The truth is, as amazing, godly and God-sent as Slavic is, he is also human. He has his rough days and I have mine. It doesn’t take much to end up in a misunderstanding or conflict when we are running on our human love.
1 Peter 4:8 says, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”
When we love each other deeply, we still notice the mistakes and shortcomings of those we are in a relationship or marriage with. Yet, we are able to cover those things. The source of this kind of love is in God’s presence, in His Word, and in communion with Him. Without a strong relationship with Him, it is impossible to have a strong relationship with our husband, our children, siblings, parents, friends or any other human. When we run into His presence consistently, even broken relationships can be restored. I have experienced this in my own life on more than one occasion with some of the closest people. I remember harboring bitterness towards my father for some things he had failed at as I was growing up. For years I held on to that grudge against him because I was convinced he should have done better as a father. It was only through a revelation of the love of my Heavenly Father for me that I was able to let go of that grudge. God’s standards are much higher than mine, and if God loved me and forgave me when I didn’t deserve it, how could I not forgive others?
The honest truth is, most of the time, we are expecting from others a level of perfection that we ourselves have not yet reached. After I understood this, I asked my dad to forgive me for all the things I did wrong and all the times I failed to be a good daughter. Our relationship was restored.
I have made up my mind to love people from an overflow of my relationship with my Heavenly Father. The more time I spend with Him, the more I resemble Him, the more I begin to love like Him, the less I worry about how others fail to make me feel loved.
