When we think of love, most of us think of the passionate love that we see on televison, in the movies, or books. Did you know that outside of children's literature, the romance is the number one selling type of fiction? We are all looking for love but to quote a song, we're "looking for love in all the wrong places."
The Bible tells us what love is in I Corinthians 13: 4-8: "Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy;love does not parade itself, is nto puffed up; does not behave rudely, does nt seek its own; is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity (wrongdoing) but rejoices in the truth; bears all thing, believes all things, hopes all things,edures all things. Love never fails."
These are the things that make up love, not how good a person is in bed. After almost 32 years of marriage, I have discovered an amazing thing, WE'RE BOTH HUMAN and have human frailities and faults. In fact, my dream of the perfect marriage went up in smoke about 3 months after the wedding. That was the day of our first "fight". And you know what it was about? Vegetable soup!
You see, my parents are from Ohio so I learned how to cook like a "Yankee", a fact, I might add, that my spouse was unaware of. I had gotten a new crockpot as a wedding gift and decided to break it out of the box and use it. I carefully prepared what I thought was going to be a wonderful supper and waited for my beloved to come home.
When her got home, like all men, he asked, "What's for supper?" I told him that I had made vegetable soup. He opened the crockpot and cried, "That's not vegetable soup, that soupy beef stew! Here let me show you how to thicken it."
I was devastated. I told him that the beef stock, stew meat, barley, cabbage, etc. were in fact the ingredients to vegetable soup. He very authoritativly replied that vegetable soup was made in a tomato stock, with hamburger and okra, minus the cabbage.
To make a long story short, our regional differences (North vs. South) ended up with me in tears and Phil apologizing once he had tasted the "yankee" version of vegetable soup.
What has this got to do with love? Everything. That was not our first disagreement and yet, I know of couples who have divorced over less. It has nothing to do with mad passionate love, but with two people who are committed to work things out instead of insisting on their own way. Yes, I said that four letter word that lovers are so afraid of, "work".
Go back and reread I Corinthians 13: 4-8. There is not on word on passionate love, but there is a discussion on how we will know that we are truly loved. And all thoses characteristics take work. We have been working for years on our love and I can tell you that we haven't gotten it perfect yet and probably won't in this lifetime. But that's okay. There is coming a time when the two of us will love, not just one another, but also other people perfectly and THAT will be our "happily ever after."
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