Wuv. Twoo wuv.

My mother and I were talking about this the other day, and I wanted to get my thoughts out and in a somewhat orderly fashion.
People say they love each other all the time. They say they'd die for a person. They vow unending devotion, swear affection forever, say the bloom will never be off the rose. People are always coming up with prettier ways to show others that they care.
This, while certainly not a bad thing, is, in its own way, a bad thing. People give lip-service to the emotion and they feel they don't have to do anything else about it. "Hey, I TOLD you I loved you! Isn't that enough?" They couldn't be more wrong.

Love is not words. Love is actions. Love is dying to oneself daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes minutely, to help another person. Love is giving up what you want so that another might benefit. Love is making a meal when you are so tired you just want to lie down and sleep for a week, picking things up and putting them away so your husband sees a clean house when he comes home even though it feels like that's all you've been doing all day and nothing seems to help, changing a child's diaper even though it's the eleventy-billionth time that day that he's pooped and you're sick of it. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Deet.)

Love is showing the person you care for how you feel through your own self-sacrifice. It's easy to make sweeping declarations of love. It's not nearly as easy to live that feeling, to smile when you're tired and cranky and don't feel like smiling, darn it. To drop what you're doing, what YOU want to do, and take a family member from pillar to post, spending time, effort and untold amounts of money, just so they can have experiences and learn and laugh and expand their horizons. It's being in the front row of the recital hall while your child laboriously picks out "Red River Valley" on the piano and enjoying it, despite having heard that incredibly obnoxious song so many times over the past few weeks that mentally you're pulling your hair out and you've worn the enamel off your teeth from gritting them so much. It's learning all you can about a given subject because someone you care for is interested in it, or at the very least it's listening when they wax rhapsodic about it, nodding in the right places, asking questions at the right times, even if secretly you're so bored your eyes are crossing.

Love is hard work. It's not easy, not something you can play at for a few days and then decide you're done with when you've grown tired of it. Love requires commitment, dedication, and faith. And I believe that it is not something we can do in our own strength. I believe that God, our Divine Creator and the One who loved US all so much in the very beginning, is the wellspring of our own overflowing affection for one another. It is only through Him that we can truly die to our own selfish natures and give to our loved ones what they need (and deserve) from us.

I hope that no one reading this will think that I am a hypocrite for saying all this when I know all too well how lacking I am myself in so many areas. It doesn't make this any less true for me, despite knowing how much I need to improve upon. Maybe it makes it more true, because it reminds me of what I'm striving for, what I'm trying to give my children.

There are some in my family that I feel badly need to learn this lesson. It's not my place to teach them, but if anyone takes anything away from what I've said here, let it be this: Love is not something you do for yourself, to make yourself feel better. It's what you do for others, to help them set their feet upon the path, no matter the cost or benefit to yourself.

And for no other reason than because I love him, here's my blue-eyed boy. I have a bunch of pictures of him from today and yesterday, but I haven't downloaded them yet. Enjoy this one for now, and I promise that my next post will be much lighter and happier in tone. :o)