This is yet another reflection about love. I guess it is a good thing that I’ve not tired of pondering the nature of love. I hope you aren’t tired of reading about it.
Previously I wrote:
- Love is “to will what is best for the other”
- To know the “best” or “the good” takes wisdom and knowledge
- Love is a skill; one can be good at loving or bad at it
The past few days I’ve been thinking:
Man, love is work, hard, tiring, even draining work.
Work.
I gave my wife a deck of cards for Christmas. There are 52 cards in a deck and 52 weeks in a year and on each card I wrote some nice thing for the week, like:
- Let’s go out to dinner this week
- I’ll clean the apartment this week
- You can sleep in everyday!
- ….stuff like that.
Each Sunday of the year I’ll shuffle, she’ll cut the deck, and I (or we) will do whatever the card says.
The sad observation is: it’s only the third week of the year and I’m tired. I’m not tired of the deck of cards, I just feel tired.
Some of the cards are nice notes, not things to do, like:
- I love you
- You are beautiful
- You are my queen [on the Queen cards…clever, huh?]
- …stuff like that
Yesterday was only the third Sunday and I found myself wishing she was going to pull an encouraging word, rather than a task. It’s the first full week back to work from the break. The students are moving back to my residence hall. I have business meetings and committee meetings and a writing group starting back up…
…And Candice pulled “I do all the dishes this week”.
Jesus observed that it’s a lot easier to say something than to prove it with actions.
Love is a skill that takes effort to exhibit, to refine, to prove.
Love is work.
The gift of the cards will help me work at it this year, and though I’m tired I know that’s a good thing.
What is helping you work at it?
What is helping you overcome the tiredness?
4 Responses to The Work of Love
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Growing up, Kyle Strobel knew all the "right" answers. The Christianity he experienced in the church was reduced to theological precepts and moral codes. He tried typical spiritual growth formulas but faith remained stagnant, even stale. Sound familiar?
In Journey with Jesus, spiritual director Larry Warner guides us through the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius similarly to the way he's been leading people through them in person.
Hey Jared,
I love the heart behind the gift of your cards, but I can’t help but think back to your previous post about loving being a part of relationship.
What if you didn’t try to express your love to your wife this week by executing a task pulled at random from a pile, but rather, you talked to your wife about how you can love her in the limitations of your life this week?
Will it really be loving if you do all the dishes because it’s on a card, but all the time you are drained and maybe even a little resentful?
Or would it be more loving to bump the dish doing to the following week and ask your wife how you can best love her right where you are, in the midst of your tiredness and limitations?
Because, after all, isn’t love about relationship, and doesn’t your wife want the good for you in return?
well, the ultimate point I was trying to make here is that Love is something that requires effort (work). Relationships take work as well… I don’t think that’s a point that needs to be argued, and it’s certainly linked to my point.
this would still be true if I sat down and had a conversation each week (or whatever). Intentional conversations are difficult, sometimes awkward. Intentionality and fortitude are required to have them.
To address the point at hand, the cards are only random in that we pull one of 52 of them, ultimately they aren’t random, because i wrote them all with Candice in mind, knowing what she wants of me on a regular basis.
I think of the gift to her as weekly Spiritual Disciplines. I ought to be helping with the dishes (for example) fairly often. a few weeks out of this year doing 100% of them will help me do 50% of them throughout the year.
Additionally, I am definitely the kind of person who needs to get up and move around even when i feel tired. fortitude has never been something I have a lot of. If i never did things when i felt drained, I’d never do things.
(and i do feel tired, but not resentful… I don’t know if that would change my discussion… but at any rate, I didn’t mean to communicate that)
To draw an analogy, I don’t feel like reading my bible very often, but I do it. I talk to God about how I don’t feel like it and about how I feel tired because of it and about how I lack motivation, but I still do it, because it’s good for me and for that relationship.
I have thought about this very idea quite often. It sometimes comes up in a discussion when one has been married a very long time (as is the case with your very old parents.) We had a very nice little talk in Los Olivos on Saturday with a couple who have been married over 20 years. The point is people ask or find out how many years you have been married. If it is a fairly long time they usually respond by saying something like, “Wow, are you ever lucky!” The more years, the louder and more exuberant the “lucky.” I either think in my mind or actually say, “Luck has nothing to do with it.” It’s a lot of work. But, worth it.
[...] little while ago I wrote about my Christmas gift to my wife, a deck of cards with nice tasks I would do for her throughout [...]