UNMERITED LOVE

Last night my wife and I celebrated 11 years of marriage and we have the picture to prove it.  But as everyone who is married knows, marriage is not all sunshine and rainbows.  It is often hard work highlighted by moments of beauty, sacrifice, and love.  But more often than not it is just hard work.  I don't know who said it but I think it must be true that anything worth having will cost you something.  In the case of a good marriage I am convinced it will cost you a LOVE that is beyond your capability.

Reflect with me for a moment on this:

Our love for each other is not enough to get us through. 

Don't misunderstand me, I love my wife.  She is my highschool sweetheart and we have officially been together in our lives for longer than we have been apart. We started dating when she was 13 and I knew the first time we kissed in the movie "Fools Rush In" that  I love Sarah.  But our love is not enough.  Each of us have come to points where we were below zero and without hope.  The moments when we have been ready to throw in the towel stand out to me as monuments to the fact that our love has consistently fallen short.

Love falls short when we base our loving each other on how we feel, or weather or not our needs are being met.  There are lots of reasons why our love will fall short.  Sometimes we love based on the good deeds of our spouse and then when the deeds are not present we withdrawal the love. 

7 years ago Sarah and I were climbing our way out of a dark hole in our marriage.  To summarize the high points of the previous years it would be fair to say that our trust in each other had been shaken, our intimacy was lacking, and we had little to no community in our lives.  As we survived day to day I remained consistently difficult to love.  I would like to say that it is a testament to Sarah that we stayed together during those years but it is more of a testament to God's hand in our marriage that we did not divorce.  When our love for each other was no longer enough, it was God's love for us that got us through.  Sarah must have been on empty for months on end but she also had started to do something crazy.  She started to pray for me.  As she would pray I would get upset and hate her more.  My actions and attitude did not deserve love.  But, Sarah's love for me was not her own.   Her love and her actions were being shaped and changed by God's love for me.  Her love was not her own.  Her love falls short.  His love never ends. 

This is my whole point.  I am convinced that love that keeps people together must be a love that is beyond our capability.  It must be a love that comes from God.  Because God knows that I have been unlovable and untrustworthy.  But isnt that the beauty of love that flows from God?  That His love is unmerited, unearned, and most of the time unrequited. 

The good news of Jesus seems to show every where to me these days.  After 11 years of marriage, the love that we needed to get us through didn't even come to us from each other.  It came from the true love story that is bigger than us all.  The unrequited love of Jesus extended to us in the brokenness of our marriage to heal us and set us back on our feet.