What is love?

Hollywood is just full of love. Bookstore shelves are filled with novels about it. The computer seems to have a permanent scrolling banner, proclaiming promises of how to find love with this or that singles site. The movies and TV have story after story, finding love, unrequited love, everlasting love. At least half the songs written are about it. At least.

But what is it?

I have been married a long time. 33 years at last count. I married a 6'2" hunk of a man with about 8% body fat, shoulders like a lumberjack and biceps like Hercules. He married some woman who looked like a model, with long blonde hair to her teeny-tiny waist, wearing 4-inch high Candies heels and a size 5 ring. Something happened along the way and those people can no longer be found. It's as if they vanished. A mirage in the desert. A few pictures in an album. Four babies now grown, three daughter-in-laws, five grandbabies (one in the oven!), lots of houses and jobs, and way too much cheesecake later....the years peel off like a waitress's orders at a barbecue pit. When we married in a fever all those years ago, we had no idea what we were in for. 

The movies and books that tell about "true love" are always some convoluted story that ends in someone running because the bus is about to leave or the train is departing or the boat is pulling away from the dock. Then there's hugging and kissing and happily ever after. And a lot of times, in real life, that stuff happens (though not usually). There's the flush of infatuation, all the etc.'s in between, and then a conclusion with some sort of commitment. But in the real world, over 50% of married couples don't make it. For a million different reasons. It breaks my heart when they don't make it, because there's always so much more that gets broken than all the "reasons."

Part of our dilemma is that real love, in the real world, doesn't have a screenplay, a plot and a soundtrack. Well, we do, but it might wreck your ears. Most of our problem is that we're a bunch of sinners and we mess stuff up. Real love involves blood, sweat, tears, vomit and worse. But the trial isn't the drama, it's the spaces in between. When everyone is tired, Mama's sick, Daddy's not making enough money, the laundry needs doing, the bathroom needs cleaning, the joints are aching, everybody's hungry, it's sticky and hot and 95 degrees and the air goes out, there's seventeen things to do today but only time for four of those things, and then Uncle Joe dies and we need to pack up and go to the funeral in Mississippi. Rev it up and start it all over tomorrow. Then there's the days where you've gotten up to go to work for the 10,000th time at an ungodly hour, worked, driven back and forth, come home, eaten and gone to sleep and nothing even remotely exciting has crossed your path. Day after day. Year after year. The same ole gal across the table. The same ole guy across the table. You can speak each other's sentences before they roll out. You know those rumply hands, those mangy toes, and the way he takes five decades to get out of the car because he's got to get everything arranged just so. Then there's the way she makes a mess at every stop and station along the way, with apparently no promise of food coming out of the kitchen yet and it's 6:30, and seems to have no regard to the fact that company's coming tomorrow, but she's managed to talk to 23 people today.

This is love. It is the "putting." Putting one foot in front of the other. Putting up with the snoring, the mess, the neurosis.  It is the remembering. Remembering why she liked him. Remembering why he liked her. None of us really change that much. Looking to the core of that person and what made us connect like two magnets (besides just the animal magnetism). Remembering that he is a person, he needs to be acknowledged, affirmed, respected. Remembering that she longs to be cherished, loved, and believed. 

And then it's just the miracle. For us, the miracle of God. Because only God could make these two sinners put up, shut up, and forgive when they need to. Two strong-willed, opinionated first-borns on opposite ends of the spectrum...who on a bad day and without the spirit of God might have the capacity to kill each other. A miracle because in the midst of a thousand different, boring spaces interspersed with homicidal tendencies, we found the grace of God. Rather, it found us.

The grace of God. That's all I got.