Love – Barefoot Lily Lady

Faded Valentines and Undying Love

My husband knows I would much prefer a new plant for my garden over cut flowers–but the fragrant bouquet he gave me on Valentine’s Day was certainly a lovely way to remind me of his love for me and fill the wintery gap between now and the time when I can play in the dirt outside.

A breath of Spring and the hope of barefoot gardening days ahead.

As my Valentine’s Day flowers begin to droop and fade, I am reminded that Valentine’s Day can be difficult for some. In my personal circle of friends and family, several were bereaved of a loving spouse in the past year or two. Others are going through a valley experience in life and wondering whether their Valentine will be there to love on next year. None of us knows whether we have the next breath. Romantic love is wonderful, but temporary. Finding ways to express Christ-like love is the best. I love Paul Tripp’s article filled with 23 ideas for sharing love with others in 2023.

Did you have a wonderfully romantic Valentine’s Day? Or was any reference to romance or marriage painful for you this year? Maybe it was fun, flirty, and a celebration of the good season you are in. Or perhaps you had a conflict-filled week, and Valentine’s Day felt fake, forced, and a cover up.

Personally, I love romance. I am way over on the romantic end of the emotional spectrum. I do think romance, romantic gestures, gifts, dates, and surprises are an important ingredient in a healthy marriage.

But romance is not love. Romance is not a fruit of the Spirit. You can be a follower of Jesus, filled with Holy Spirit, lacking romance yet incarnating the love of Christ.

This is love: “Not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10-11, ESV).

Regardless of your marital status, here are 23 ways to express cruciform love—”in the shape of the Cross” love—in 2023.

1. Love is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not require reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving.
2. Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of another without impatience or anger.
3. Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward another, while looking for ways to encourage and praise.
4. Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses.
5. Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right.
6. Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer an excuse or shift the blame.
7. Love means being willing, when confronted by another, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus.
8. Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to another is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient.
9. Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good.
10. Love is being a good student of another, looking for their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support them as they carry it, or encourage them along the way.
11. Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face in your relationship, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response.
12. Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested.
13. Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a relationship and being faithful to your promises and true to your word.
14. Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack the other person’s character or assault his or her intelligence.
15. Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt another into giving you what you want or doing something your way.
16. Love is being unwilling to ask another to be the source of your identity, meaning and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while simultaneously refusing to be the source of theirs.
17. Love is the willingness to have less free time, less sleep, and a busier schedule in order to be faithful to what God has called you to be and to do in that relationship.
18. Love is a commitment to say no to selfish instincts and to do everything that is within your ability to promote real unity, functional understanding, and active love in your relationship.
19. Love is staying faithful to your commitment to treat another with appreciation, respect, and grace, even in moments when he or she doesn’t seem to deserve it or is unwilling to reciprocate.
20. Love is the willingness to make regular and costly sacrifices for the sake of your relationship without asking anything in return or using your sacrifices to place the other person in your debt.
21. Love is being unwilling to make any personal decision or choice that would harm your relationship, hurt the other person, or weaken the bond of trust between you.
22. Love is refusing to be self-focused or demanding but instead looking for specific ways to serve, support, and encourage, even when you are busy or tired.
23. Love is daily admitting to yourself, the other person, and God that you are not able to love this way without God’s protecting, providing, forgiving, rescuing, and delivering grace.
We love because he first loved us!
God bless,
Paul David Tripp

There are people in my life I am having great difficulty loving as I should. This list reminded me of ways I can show Christ-like love to these prickly-hard-to-love people. I plan to print it and put it in my prayer journal as a guide, not only to prayer, but for putting love into action.

My hope and prayer is that this post will encourage someone who reads this to greater love in your circle of people who need His love.

A Special Moment

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
James 1:17 (ESV)

I’m not going to sugar-coat it. This leg of mom’s Alzheimer’s journey is rough. To this point in our journey together, there has almost always been a spark of recognition and joy in mom’s eyes when she sees me. In her mind’s eye, I am not always her daughter, but I’m always someone special: sometimes her mom, other days her sister or best friend. Gina, co-owner of BeeHive, and also Mom’s nurse, pointed out that I am all of mom’s favorite people rolled up into one. That was a sweet thought – something I hadn’t thought of before.

Not today. The light was gone out of her beautiful brown eyes. In those eyes which once held kindness, joy, and sometimes a bit of mischief, today there was only a blankness, ambivalence, and a lack of recognition that goes deeper than the momentary blips I’ve seen thus far. I know that this is part of the disease process as Alzheimer’s claims more of her mind and beautiful spirit, but it’s still rough on the heart.

God, in His grace, knew I would need extra encouragement today, so He had prepared three special gifts for me.

The first gift was breakfast with Maureen, a friend I haven’t seen in a few decades. We met up at Hubbard Avenue Diner in Middleton and enjoyed one another’s company and two hours of sharing where our individual journeys had taken us over the past few decades of life. What a blessing.

My pastor met up with me in the parking lot at BeeHive bearing today’s second gift: encouragement in the form of a favorite salad he had purchased for me. BeeHive is under precautionary lock-down due to the coronavirus threat, thus the parking lot meeting place. Truth be told, the greatest gift was actually not the salad – it was his listening ear and being wrapped in a prayer in the middle of a parking lot.

Today was a mostly eyes closed kind of day.

God had my momma deliver the third gift. Mom hadn’t recognized me at all today, so this gift was quite unexpected. I was watching her blindly fiddle-footing around in her wheelchair when she sidled up to where I was seated and, without a word, took my hand in hers and began examining it and stroking it with gentleness. Patting my hand in hers, she looked into my eyes and let me see the love in hers.

Rewind: “He Meets She”

Seventeen letters from her and eighteen letters from him later, and it was time for “he” and “she” to finally meet one another in person. The letters between them had been filled with bits and pieces of thoughts shared and information that helped them “get to know” one another. Each letter revealed just a little bit more about the person holding the pen.

About a month before he came home on leave, he sat down to write. The mood struck him to write another poem. The poem took her by surprise – for it was on the theme of love. To this point, none of their letters had even hinted that they might at some point date, let alone fall in love. Yet, she read with interest what he had to write and wondered if it was a measure of what was in his heart:

“Love” – what is it?
A word that’s used so frequently,
By many quite confused
They think they use it properly,
And yet “love” is oft abused.

How can I spell the meaning that,
In just a couple words,
Relates exactly what love means,
And not destroy the word?

It seems the dictionary lacks,
Enough vocabulary,
To even start this giant task
Or end it properly.

Is friendship love or vice versa?
A miracle in thought?
Or is it even greater still
To think of things Christ taught?

On earth we’ll never really know,
The sparkling magnitude,
Or what it really means or does.
It seems I’m more confused.

Where does “love” come from, or “love” go?
From heart to heart perhaps?
Does anyone pretend to know?
There are no “Atlas” maps.

I think love is being loved
A little brings a lot.
And God planned and started it,
Or else we’d be without.

Was he falling in love with someone he hadn’t yet met? Was he thinking about the possibilities? Was he already thinking about taking their relationship to the next level? Was she?

Sunday, August 5, 1973 finally dawned. Today was the day… and I don’t think she heard a single word of what was being taught in Sunday School that morning. Nervously fidgeting in class, she kept thinking about what would happen next. In less than one hour she would meet in person the guy she had been writing for the past 7 months. There would now be a face and a voice to the name scrawled at the end of the letters she had read in earnest. She was excited, nervous, eager, scared and a jumble of other feelings all at once.

To help him pick her out in the crowd, she told him she would be wearing a pink dress. It was her favorite dress, the one she had worn to the church “senior banquet.”

In their last letters to one another before he came home on leave, they made plans to meet at church between Sunday School and the morning worship service. Now, with her best friend next to her for moral support, she timidly walked down that long second floor hallway scanning the crowd looking for him. Her heart skipped a beat as her shy eyes caught a glimpse of him standing there at the far end of the hall – tall, handsomely tanned, and dressed in his Navy whites. He was looking for her too!

Intense nervousness set in. Even though she had agreed to meet him in that hallway just outside the church library, she still felt apprehensive and awkward. What should she say? Should she shake his hand, or give him a hug? Should she say, “Hi, I’m Cindie, and you must be Wayne” or just simply say “Hi Wayne”?

Nonchalant! That’s what she decided she would be. She would just turn her head and engage herself in deep conversation with her friend (nervous, nonsensical babble, actually) and just walk slowly past him and wait for him to make the first move.

It worked.

He thought she was a bit of a scatter-brain walking past him like that, but he stopped her and soon the introduction was history. Little did they know, as God would have it, this was the introduction to their future.

Coming soon: “The First Date”