Valentine’s Day can be tough for widows. Last year, a student asked me what I thought I would get from my husband for Valentine’s Day. She hadn’t realized he had died because, she said, “You always talk about him as if he is alive.”
It was a lovely compliment that got me thinking about the years since Ron passed and how each Valentine’s Day has become a little less painful. I am still a widow, but I have come to learn the true meaning of love.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
I Corinthians 13:4-8
What is the true nature of love? It is impossible for human beings to live up to what the Bible describes as “love.” Ron and I were married for almost 44 years. We had a good, solid marriage despite the two decades Ron was ill, but we fell short of these ideals often. I know I was not always as patient as I wanted to be, and I know that Ron often envied other couples who had more material wealth than we did.
It is only God who can live up to the ideal of love. After all, he created the emotion within us. He sets the standards for it. The verses we think of as “the love chapter” were not intended by Paul to be romantic, but rather the foundation of all things.
The church at Corinth struggled with immorality, idol worship, and self-interest. Paul wanted to remind the church that whatever they did, it did not matter if it was not done in love. These verses are full of 15 action words that constitute real love. I’ll look at just two in this post.
- Love is patient. Truth. Loving Ron was not always easy. In 1994, he began having mental issues and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For years, he swung on the pendulum between manic and depressed. There were many nights I heard him playing basketball on Allen’s court in the backyard at 3 AM. There were other mornings I awoke to find him gone with a note hastily scribbled on the kitchen table. Ron’s bipolar was difficult to explain to others outside our family. In a way, his car accident in 2000 made it easier, because people understood physical maladies in a way they could not fathom mental illnesses.But I made the choice to love Ron. Not because it was easy, not because he was always lovable, not because I was necessarily a good person. I did it because I had taken a vow to love him. I had made a commitment, the same commitment God makes to us.
- Love is kind. We should always react with goodness and kindness, but it’s a hard thing to do. There were times Ron blamed me for his illnesses, yelling that if I really loved him, I would cure him. Of course, curing Ron was beyond my human power. I did the best I could by taking care of him, taking him to doctors, working extra jobs to pay the medical bills not covered by insurance, and trying to understand that he needed someone to blame and I was handy. In the early years, I tried to reason with him. Eventually, though, I would just pat him on the shoulder and turn away.God never turns away from us. God always responds to us with love, even when we are dead wrong.
Have you ever found it difficult to love someone, even when you knew it was the right thing to do?
Want to read more about Linda’s life as a widow and the mother of an autistic adult son? Check out her blog at Quirky: Because we’re all a little different.
