40 Love

I love a grand gesture in movies. For example, I adore when Mark shows up at Juliet’s door in Love Actually or Lloyd blasts Peter Gabriel through a boombox in Say Anything. But the truth is that in real life I prefer the ordinary. I love when my husband does the dishes or my kids take in the groceries without being asked. I love nothing more than when a friend brings me a coffee or offers to share their fries. Showboating is great in the movies, but in my real life I just want people who are willing to show up. I want love that sits beside rather than holds up a stereo. To quote Jerry Maguire, I don’t need the big, impassioned speech; “You had me at hello.”

I have found that so many people appreciate the everydayness of love rather than the big grand gesture. We want to watch the romcom, but we want to live into the steady and hard. One is an escape, but the other is true. Sometimes we love the idea of a person or thing more than the reality of them. Sometimes we love who we want them to be instead of figuring out who they actually are.

I think most of us really want what is true, even if it scares us. We want to be seen and loved in the same way by our families, our friends and our God. I think for me it is the only hope for loving my whole self. I’m certain every self-help book would tell me that I have the order wrong. That I need to love myself before I can love others, but 1 John 4:19 tells me otherwise. “We love because He first loved us”. 

I had a friend read that verse at my wedding instead of the more popular 1 Corinthians passage. Back then, I still had no clue what I was promising, who I was or who my kids would be. Honestly, we are all four still figuring it out. I am loved, so I can love. I can love the faults and the ordinary and the truth. All my life I have wanted to love others well, even those who have loved me imperfectly. For me, loving well has not been the hard part. Instead, the lesson of my life has been learning that I am loved. A kind of love that looks both in the mirror and others and doesn’t have to cringe or want for more. Not a love that completes us, instead a love that is made complete in us.  I’ve had the order wrong all along. The beginning was the end. The end was the beginning. 

In tennis, a score of zero is called “love.”  Love is the beginning. Love is the baseline. And often love is the score when you lose. Love isn’t a win or an ace. It is simply showing up and a willingness to try. I think I sometimes make the same mistake with my faith. I think that loving God requires big movie-style gestures, like a Mother Teresa style life to really love God. That surely I can’t love Him with a tired prayer shot off at a red light or making the same mistakes over and over again. Thankfully, love is more like tennis than the movies.

Love is the baseline. It is the beginning. He loves us first. All of us, even the parts we can’t see yet. God is love, and all I have to do is simply show up, no boombox or ace required.

(The rest of this essay and several more on everyday love are in my upcoming book, These Three Remain: A Collection of Essays Exploring Faith in Questions, Hope in Struggle, and Love in an Ordinary Life. Visit www.michellewallishurst.com to learn more or preorder a digitall copy.)