Last in this week’s series on love… Love and death are hard. Up close to death’s face this week, I’ve felt, all the way through, the anquish of the wrestle with the last enemy. Love, too, is about dying. And so the struggle…
It isn’t just the Valentine’s Day preparations, with cookies, icing, sprinkles, tape and paper everywhere. It generally gets messy in here. Because love is messy business. And we are just a bunch of people, a family with some little kids and some big kids, and some bigger kids, living within four walls, trying to figure out how this business of love works. Anywhere folks are unpacking what it means to love, they are unpacking a whole lot of mess.
“Greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life for his brother.” Laying down one’s life is merely a tactful euphemism for the grisly business of dying. Greater love has no man than this: dying, violently and painfully, to self.
It is part of our very DNA: we fight death. As Dylan Thomas exhorts, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” As we die to self, we do just that: rage. Wrestling with Death may leave battlefields strewn with mess and gore. Screaming, tears, anguish. Similar to what these four walls experience day in and day out in our family life. Kids arguing over toys, teens stomping over chores, parents working out priorities. It ain’t always pretty around here.
When the decibel levels reach window-shaking levels, cue the love song. The lyrics of the CD, whispering Biblical truth, hush the din:
“Love suffers long and is kind;
Learning to be patient… kind… to not seek our own way… is hard business… deathly business… messy business. It doesn’t come naturally and requires practice, scenes repeating themselves day after day. It takes blood, sweat and tears.
Jesus knows. In the utter agony of a pitch black night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Son implored the Father for another way. There wasn’t. Dying wrung the Son of Man Himself out in trickling drops of blood, pooling in grief. Messy business.
Jesus is intimately acquainted with the mess in here. It is Him we imitate when we genuinely love, laying down ourselves.
Taking a deep breath, I step onto the battlefield. (One feels less frustration with the tug and tension of family life when one forsakes the expectations of Hallmark-polished, romantic love, and fully embraces the fact that love is messy business, as each one dies, excruciatingly, to self.)
Wrapping up Malakai and Shalom in a sandwich hug, I whisper, “What do you think? Maybe you could try this pink one and Shalom have this red one?”
From the archives of the Home and School Column at CWO
