“A dream that will need / All the love you can give / Every day of your life / For as long as you live.”
Today is our anniversary, and I confess I haven’t given all to my bride that I should have these many years. Diane never bats an eye at my old joke, “Diane has been happily married for seven years,” but there’s some truth in that. Every year she’s given of herself for me as wife, our children as mother, for church and community. She is without doubt the most self-less and giving person I have ever known. Perhaps her greatest virtue after love is patience, with me.
C.S. Lewis: “Love as distinct from ‘being in love’ is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both parents ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run; being in love was the explosion that started it.” (Mere Christianity)
Happy anniversary, Diane! We’ll be gone for a few days, celebrating slo mo, appropriate to this time of life. Lord willing, back next Tuesday.
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