Amazing Love

 

I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day, thinking about love. Not the smarmy way love is often treated on this day, but love in the deepest sense.

One of the most amazing parts of being human is our ability to love. It’s like a never ending pool we can draw from. Years ago, while awaiting the birth of our nephew, close friends were sharing that their daughters had concerns. For years those girls had been our “chosen” godchildren (they referred to us as their fairy godparents). With the coming of our first (and only) nephew, they were concerned we’d no longer have any room to love them. In all our excitement about our nephew, we’d never given a thought that the girls might feel this way. I wonder how many children, waiting the birth of a new sibling, have similar worries.  It became a wonderful opportunity to share that love doesn’t work that way. We have room to love them and love our nephew, all with the same intensity. In fact loving produces more love – it multiplies!

I was amazed to also discover how deeply you can love someone even before they were born. When we received news of the expected nephew, it hit me like a rush. I loved this little boy, 9 months before I even met him, and upon meeting him, well the love only gushed out more.

We never had the privilege of having children of our own – or better put, giving birth to our own children. But we have had an abundance of children to love. Our two girls mentioned above, our nephew, and the young teen we took into our home a couple years after we were married. That teen stayed with us several years and is part of our chosen family. The daughter of a friend became a surrogate grandchild upon her birth.  Above that, we officiated three marriages of young people we love as deeply. One of each couple was a student I had taught, whose parents we’d grown close to and the relationships continued long past graduation. They, their spouses and their families, are more part of our family than friends. One of those three we consider our chosen daughter.

Having those experiences has taught us a lot about the power of love in our life. This concept of chosen family is amazing. My husband was adopted, at the age of 9, by wonderful, loving, older parents. My adored nephew was also adopted, his birth parents choosing my brother and his wife to raise their child when they could not. When we took in the teenager from our youth group, he chose us to be his forever family and that relationship has continued for 40 years. My parents had several foster kids join our family through the years. We’ve seen chosen family in action, and experienced it every day. These family connections could not be any stronger if we’d given birth or been born into them.

A lot of people can’t imagine this type of family building. How could you open your home to someone outside? Others can’t imagine this love being equal to blood family in any way.  My husband has a cousin who felt the estate left to him when his parents died wasn’t legal, because my husband wasn’t “blood”.  She didn’t even recognize the legal bond adoption creates, let alone the family/love bond created. Our chosen son and daughter do not carry any of our blood, but the bond we share is every bit as strong for all parties involved.

Of course, not all such stories have happy endings. My parents had one foster experience that was really terrible, and became their last. And even when relationships are good, strong friendships, most can wane over time as people move on into different seasons. Not everyone even wants their friends to “be like family”, since dealing with their own family is enough. But for us, this little circle of chosen, extended family has been, though not always blissful, a blessing.

Someone once told me it was “nice” of me for taking in our son. “Nice” is not the word I would have chosen. It was hard, and sometimes I was anything but nice. We were all dealing with a lot of heavy issues. It was complicated and exhausting. But what held it all together was the fact that we loved him so much, we couldn’t imagine any other way than to have him with us.

Not long after my mother passed away, my Dad remarried. I was an adult, married, on my own. It should have been no big deal. But I was still grieving, and my step-mother wasn’t my mother. They were very different. And she wanted so badly to be part of our family, she tried too hard, making things worse most times. But I got tired of fighting against the very core of my existence – to love. I spent many years praying about our relationship and eventually realized I had come to love her, deeply. And if I thought that turn around was amazing, my brother, who had been not so subtle about his feelings regarding our step-mother, one day called my sister and asked if she could broker a conversation. This was after our Dad had died, and my brother felt convicted to ask her forgiveness. They had the conversation, and although the relationship was far from perfect, my brother shared how incredible it was that he was feeling love for someone for whom he’d never imagined feeling anything but tolerance.

People who have no relationship with God can and do have equally powerful stories about love. I believe it’s a common grace springing out of how we are created – to be in relationship and to love deeply. I believe God desires relationship with his creation, and loves us so deeply, he gave us Jesus. Where our very nature makes it impossible for us to have a relationship with God, he took our nature on himself so we could have forgiveness and enjoy a relationship with the Holy God.

Because of that Gift, we can love even more deeply, especially people we wouldn’t choose to love. Jesus taught that we were to love our neighbor as our self. And what makes a neighbor? I would think anyone near us for any portion of time could be a neighbor. Loving in this way would sometimes be impossible without God doing the loving through us. It’s easy for most of us to love a baby. Most of us have “fallen in love” with someone, and that’s dangerously easy to do. But to love a stranger who sits by us on a plane, or a student who has never taken a bath, or anyone who is different from us and makes us uncomfortable – that takes a love more powerful than we can conjure.

Loving the unlovely is most difficult. But that’s what God did for us. As wonderful as we think we are, it doesn’t take much to realize we are far from perfect. Some of us don’t love ourselves at all, let alone a neighbor. But if we remember that Jesus loved us enough to die for all of us, before we had a chance to clean up our act, if He did that for us, it’s not asking too much to allow him to love others through us, is it?

While loving the young people that came into our life was relatively easy, others, like my step-mother, were not so easy to love and required God’s empowerment. This is especially the case when, like my brother, you feel a conviction, but on your own would have never stepped forward to do anything about it. It was rather a miracle that he took the steps to ask her forgiveness, and out of that God poured love. There are people in our lives we have to live with/by, work with, be around that we sometimes just can’t stand. We feel anything but love for them. As a believer, I have learned to pray for those people, and ask God to help me love them. Much like my step-mother, God has answered that prayer, and changed my perspective.

This isn’t like a magic pill. Sometimes I never get to that space. Sometimes I don’t pray for the change of heart. And in most all of the experiences, the love isn’t the same as what I feel towards family. But it is compassion and caring and finding joy being with them.

Love in any form is an amazing gift. To be loved, there is nothing like it. I stand in awe at being loved by the Creator of the Universe. I also marvel at the love given to me by others. Loving others is pretty wonderful too; although it can pack with it a lot of other, not so wonderful things, it’s worth it. Relationships are messy and complicated. God’s loving me certainly comes with a lot of not so wonderful things from my end, my being much less than wonderful most times. But He does love me, not because I am worthy of his love, but just because He loves me.  He calls us then to love, and I’ve found loving my neighbor to give me greater understanding of God’s love.

Romans 5: 5-8 “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to me. You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possible dare to die. But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”