Love Chooses - A Minute of Presence for Women
Love Chooses
Love is something miraculous. Something miraculous that I do based on something miraculous already done for me. We are loved by a crazy-good God. And then we decide to love in imitation of his good and gracious example. “We love,” writes the apostle John, “because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NIV). My God empowers my feeble attempts at proactive love, infusing them with his beauty and fierce loving-kindness. But I have to try. I have to choose to love with his kind of love.
As I write this, a favorite aunt is growing feeble and her husband even feebler. A few months ago, when my aunt and uncle could no longer take care of each other, their children moved him into a nursing home. She lasted less than a week in her comfortable, familiar home without him. Then she left it, closing the door behind her to share a small, bare room with him, no more than a mile away. She chose. Love chooses.
A good friend’s sister has Alzheimer’s. In the evenings, after my friend has worked a full day and the caregiver she has hired has gone home, she sits on the sofa with her sister and holds her hand. “I like this,” her sister told her recently. “I like it too,” my friend said. She is choosing. Love chooses.
My two precious nieces married last year—one in January and one in October. Their young lives stretched out wide before them like an open road, but they both willingly narrowed the boundaries with spoken I dos. The youngest one’s voice quivered as she said the words; her older sister’s rang out clear as a bell. But they both chose. Love chooses.
Love chooses the moments, and those moments become days and months and years. Love chooses—and by choosing, knowingly forfeits other choices. It is even glad to do so. Love chooses when it is afraid or hurt or fears rejection. When it is tired or uncertain or empty. The heart-rattling power of love is perfected in weakness, and it blooms bright and irresistible and wild every time it chooses.
Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence.
1 John 3:18-19, NIV
