Love

It is sometimes true that the most loving thing to do is to hide your love. 

This truth barely makes sense in a society that tells us that self expression is the reason for our existence.  There is a sense in which love is the expression of our feelings.  But the expression doesn’t make the love.  The love waits behind the doing and the saying and the sharing.  And even when there is no doing or sharing, it can still be there, that feeling that makes what happens to another person matter more than what happens to yourself. 

If you are lucky, or if you are reckless, you will get to express your love.  What impulse is inside you: to dance with joy (or cry alone), to leave a love note, to give a gift, to plant a kiss, to meet an other’s eyes with shining esteem – will rise to the surface and exist as this event in the world, something for history if history concerned itself with such details.  It has been known to happen that these gestures have, though sincerely manifesting love, been missed or mistaken, and the object of love has not known the heart behind them.  Love can be real, and can be acted out, without being communicated. 

Communication is precious in love! One person is enabled to make another person know some part of their heart.  When they do, the beloved must choose to receive the love or else stiffen and fight against it.  It is an everyday treasure too much taken for granted, that received love can bloom into reciprocation.  The beloved doesn’t just say, “I know,” or even, “Thank you”; they say, “I love you, too.” They join the embrace.  Sometimes this sharing is the only thing we have in mind when we use the word love. 

“I love you,” doesn’t exist only as a tender voice to thrilling feelings.  It can be a battle cry, a resolute declaration of will, and it can go on being said and meant when feelings slacken or are buried beneath a hoard of life’s other matters.  These words then, and the choices that accompany them, are just as truly love as the fluttering heart or the passionate heat the movies portray. 

So sometimes that will, with or without emotions, must choose to do what is good for the other, even if that good is to give space, to keep quiet, to deny the fulfillment and gratification of one’s own being – so that the other person can be and do and find out and focus on what they need, on what God is doing in their life at that moment.  It can be like that for a short time, a long time, or forever.  I do not believe it is wrong to love like this, though I believe it would be wrong for a marriage to harbor this kind of love.  Often it is so secret that no one will laud it.  It is so noble that our culture despises it.  This is an act of love. 

To God be all glory.