Perhaps the hardest thing about love is being convinced that you must actually work at it.
Oh how I adore those things that come naturally to me! Or is it the ease and simplicity of feeling good-about-myself-without-trying-very-hard that I adore so much?
What-- really --do we truly enjoy that requires no effort at all? Yes, I know what you are thinking...a meal delivered or house-cleaning service...you wouldn't mind not applying effort in those areas from time to time. But, a meal made and a home cleaned come at a price and with effort...of some kind from someone. There's a cost to everything wonderful and worthwhile.
So I'm pondering, this Valentine's week, on the labor that LOVING is.
True love isn't always magical and mysterious, star-gazing and endlessly alluring.
Instead, true love is most oven realistic and revealing, requiring focus and a deliberate endeavoring to seek out what is worthy of adoration.
I have a wonderful, healthy, Christ-filled marriage to an amazing man...and LOVE takes continual effort. From both of us. It takes not giving up. It takes dying to self, and living in sanctification. It takes forgetting easy, and believing that everything worthwhile costs something.
It may cost us time. It may cost us energy. It may cost us our pride. It may cost us our selfish notions of love.
I'm thinking today on what it is to love with Christ's love; the love that was given freely but cost Him everything.
I'd be a fool to think that loving another human being could be any easier than the example set by my Savior.
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us andgave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ephesians 5:1-2
So, if this week, you find that you continue to labor in the art of loving while the the world around you is charmed by the illusion of the effortless flutter of enamored hearts...take heart, you are in good company. Of those who press on in vulnerability, building the house one brick at a time and bravely tearing down the walls between. Of those who serve sacrificially. Of those who fight for their marriages. Of those who keep the fire burning by fanning the flame of costly love, knowing there is nothing to lose when our Savior has paid it all.
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Welcome to GraceLaced Mondays, a link up dedicated to sharing any and all blog posts by like-minded lovers of grace--God's grace! Grace is found in the everyday when you are intentional about taking note of it...and I invite you to share your story, great or small, of how everyday moments are full of Grace.
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