The High Cost of Love
My parents have been married 60 years. They’ve been together for more than half a century and I am so proud of them. In a world that considers marriage disposable and covenants simply lose commitments, they’ve put a priority on growing a strong, long lasting foundation of love.
As I look on their marriage and the marriages around me, I am struck by a simple truth – Love is hard. I wish it was rainbows and sunny days all the time, but it’s just not. And one of the hardest things about love is that to experience it, you have to be willing to experience grief.
You don’t get to hand pick the things you want to open your heart to and the things you want to keep out. To open your heart to love is to open your heart to wide range of emotional experiences. To surrender your heart to love is to surrender your heart to a world of feelings and situations. One of which, is grief.
I forget this principle sometimes. I forget that to love wholly is to wholly experience grief at other times, but it is true. At funerals, you see this. The men and women that had the greatest impact, often leave behind friends and family members that know the greatest grief. For a time, the vulnerability of loving that person who passed away is replaced by a deep sense of grief.
That’s part of love. A willingness to know that grief will come. A bravery to face it honestly and openly. A patience to give yourself the time to work through it. A courage to admit to friends that you need a shoulder or an ear.
The great news, in this truth, in this principle, is that love wins. With God, grief does not have the final word. Grief is not given the last statement on any situation. Clouds part, light returns and with it, comes love.
This post is categorized Love
As one who has experienced MORE than her fair share of grief in life, I can tell you from experience that the more grief I experience, the stronger the bonds of love between myself and the people left behind become. I think it is Gods way of placing His arms around us and holding us until the grief eases. Those people he places in our life … those ears, those shoulders, my husbands gentle touch … are almost like Gods own ears, shoulders and touch. I’m so thankful for those people because through them, God SHOWERS me in His love! Great blog today, Dan! I’ve been reading Corinthians this week!
You are right that love is hard. There are so many things we can not control and the ability to recognize our boundaries and deal with them in a positive way would fail, without belief and a relationship with God.
I believe that is why family and our world is so broken today.
I too, have parent’s that stayed married 55 yrs. until my father’s death & am sad to say that my first marriage, with two children, did not last.
Divorce is like a death & causes sometimes a longer grief period.
Is there any advice you can give to those of us that remarry and have adult children that are bitter from the grief of divorce?
Dan,
Beautiful words as always, and rooted in truth.
Upon reading your post, I began to ponder your thoughts, and God’s grace kept creeping into my thoughts.
It’s only by His grace that we can experience true love, and more so agape love. The good news is that God’s grace and provision are sufficient to help us persevere and even thrive through the grief we experience in this life.
-In His Grip
Eric Randolph
Thank you. I needed these thoughts. Having lost 5 family members in the last 8 months this helped me understand the grief I still feel today