Twenty Eight Years in Learning How to Love

This morning first thing, David rolled over in bed and whispered “Happy Anniversary.” I had been awake already and thinking about it. “Thinking about it” conjures up images of accuracy and rationality and that’s not how it is. The thoughts I’m talking about that slog slowly through my head just after waking are half mixed with sleep, and yet there is clarity and trueness that comes then and evaporates like morning mist when I move to a vertical position and walk about. So I prefer to lay still for as long as I can, finding out the most important things in my heart and trying to stiffen them up and put them into a firmer setting that will stick tight when I get up. David was there this morning when this was in process and I’m glad. “What did I say first thing this morning?” I ask him as he takes a shower at noon. In the intervening time we’ve had a morning walk, pancakes from the griddle, and Emily has packed up and left for the summer. Important thoughts are gone, I’ve forgotten again.

It was something about marriage, what I’ve learned, what I’m sorry about, and it was important. He does not remember it all, but in the talking about it, something is jogged. A ha. Yesterday we walked along the bike trail that sidles up beside the Pemigewasset River down to the Basin in the White Mountains to enjoy the light dancing in the clear moving water above a granite river bed. There was a group of us walking at various speeds and along the way in conversation we learned that a couple we know is having trouble in their marriage. It could have been us a few years ago. How well I remember the excruciating and nearly hopeless pain of a failing relationship. But I love David--always have, always will--and thankfully he loves me too, and we were not willing to give up. Together, we prayed and worked and a way opened for us that led up and out.

What I’ve learned has come it bits and pieces that require assembly without a diagram to help out. This morning’s revelation was about how marriage is designed around the pattern of the Godhead – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus loves and honors the Father, the Holy Spirit loves and brings honor to Jesus and there is this abundant circle of love and honor, all built around self-giving. Maybe that is what the wedding band is supposed to mean. Love and life bubbles out of these Three unbidden and unborrowed, and They work in a unity of purpose – right now, to rescue humanity. How slowly I have come to self-giving love, and to honoring. How slowly I have come to an acceptance that our marriage needs the focus of one purpose, stubbornly setting in my heels to the idea. I was certain that it would lead to my demise as an individual. But I have found the opposite; I’ve grown more as an individual when I gave up on maintaining my individuality with militancy. And here’s where I come to regrets and apologies, because I can clearly see that as our union has come to resemble this original pattern, there has been rich peace and a harmony of action and love that has grown up thickly and flowed over and into the margins like a happy vine. The blessing has overtaken and filled in the hole made from the ripping out of the old ways. I look back with sorrow on my self-centeredness that dominated and damaged our love and our life.

Yesterday David and Emily and I sang for church. “Here is love, vast as the ocean/Lovingkindness as the flood/when the Prince of Life, our Ransom/Shed for us His precious blood….On the mount of crucifixion/Fountains opened deep and wide/through the floodgates of God’s mercy/Flowed a vast and gracious tide…” I found a book by John Bunyon on the same topic as these word, and first heard this song within about a week. The message was that there is a lot of love out there available. I wanted to tap into it. I wanted it in me. I’ve been on a search for love for years, not following a straight line either. One would think, “You have God, you have your husband, you got it all.” But it’s not so simple as that, even if it is very close to true. It has not been so much about them, as about me – my capacity to receive love, my capacity to believe myself lovable, my capacity to know what love is. And how are these capacities developed if they do not exist innately? Shall I dig a bigger hole in my heart? All I can think to do is ask, and so I ask to understand more and have my capacity enlarged. The answer is not long in coming, demonstrated to me in a person brought closer. My heart is enlarging, my mind is exercised on the lessons to be learned.

So David, twenty eight years into our living lesson on learning to love, we are still on the path and growing stronger, better, and more peaceful as we go. Our children are grown and mostly gone with all of our relationships remaining in tact. You have taught school for 30 years, we have a small house and a small plot of land and are out of debt. These are our accomplishments. We have come full circle again, back to when we met, and we have each other exclusively again. All the things I fell in love with about you, are still active and I am still in love with you. I am happy and content. My only wish is to learn to love you better. We’ve got time, I hope.