Love.

Is there anything better than love?  Being in love, loving someone else, feeling loved by your spouse, your family, your friends?  There are books about it.  Songs about it.  Poems about it.  Movies, art, and lectures on it.  It’s everywhere.  Inescapable even if you want to.

Today I am thankful for love.  Love is something of an anomaly.  It’s the biggest thing we crave but it can obliterate you within seconds.  Take our children for instance;  they are born and you cannot imagine a better feeling.  Your heart swells to unbelievable proportions.  It oozes from every crevasse of your being.  And then those children begin to grow and you start feeling a difference as they play on the playground, go to school the first time, or drive away in a car for the first time.  They start spreading their wings, and all you want is to hold on to them.  That love…can make you sick.  That love that you feel is now walking outside your body.  

Or what about your family?  The love of family is an up in the air circus ride.  It can lift you up and toss you right back towards the ground.  It can be beautiful and coarse all at the same time.  On occasion you wonder how you can love someone so intensely and hate them all at the same time.  I think families have a way of calling you on things and behaviors that can build up and tear down.  They can be as sweet as honey or as bitter as acid.  Family love can leave you empty as well as overflowing, uplift or destroyed all in a matter of moments.  It’s a strange and unusual sort of love.

The love of a spouse.  I have been with the hubs for 20 years.  We have moved all over the country, bought and sold houses, raised kids currently in the house and out on their own, traveled the World, argued, been in situations that we weren’t sure how we got into or how to get out, cried together, laughed together, prayed together; you name it, over twenty years there has been a multitude of life lived.  One thing about us, no matter the situation, is our fierce love and respect for one another.  It’s solid, resolute and unwavering.  It’s the thing of fairytales, chick flicks and romance novels.  It was truly orchestrated from above.  No other way around it.  When you meet and fall in love in a God-harmonized way, it is magical.  It’s a love that will never be severed.  

Then….there’s God’s love.  Agape love.  So intense, so unconditional.  God’s shows us a love that transcends any earthly love.  It’s whole and complete.  Never failing.  His love reaches us beyond all circumstances.  It’s the highest sky and deepest ocean and nothing can separate us from it.  It’s never failing, and will never leave us abandoned.  He can pick up the most broken of people and put them back together with His love.  It’s earth-moving and tangible.  Isn’t that something?  Who doesn’t need that?

I love that God designed us to love and be loved.  He crafted our hearts to feel the intensity of this LOVE-emotion.  I love also that He has taught us how to love.  His “manual” is full of love.

Even on the worst days, I am thankful for love.  I am thankful that I feel.  I am thankful to know that no matter what this life hands to me, I am loved and am loved exceptionally and that I love exponentially.  Regardless of circumstance the love that fills me is outer-world, secure, stable, reliable, durable and hugely surpasses any love I will ever have on this earth.

I am thankful for that L-Word…even when my heart is walking around outside my body.. I know that something else is there that fills up every space perfectly and completely.