These are notes from someone who doesn’t know much about love yet. I’m writing them to sit with as I frame my life with teachings from the Bible.
I’ve been sober more than thirty-one years. I’ve been married nearly twenty-eight years and raised four kids. And only now, approaching fifty-seven, am I beginning to suspect how little I understand about loving anyone.
For two years I’ve been trying to listen. Something is shifting. People respond to me differently. My wife is opening up, and I’m not triggered the way I used to be. And still, most of the time, there’s fear and anxiety running underneath.
This fall I lost a friend. I keep wondering how I might have loved him differently.
Around the same time, another friend was walking through the end of a relationship, and I got to walk beside him. I watched him go from feeling disrespected, to feeling abandoned and rejected, to something much more honest: sad, hurt, alone, scared. Then he found the need under all of it. He wanted to be held and told that everything was going to be okay. A few days later he was praying, “God change me. Have Your way in me.”
One line of his stays with me: “What I can give. Not what I can get or take.”
I don’t know that I helped him. I know he helped me. Watching him, I started seeing my own “yeah, but,” the way I hold back when love or closeness or an opportunity shows up, unless it’s guaranteed safe or rewarding. I started wondering how much of what looks like love in me is really self-fulfillment, with a little extra spilling over to others in ways that look acceptable.
When I look at how my wife has loved our family, I know I don’t get it yet. She isn’t the strange one. I am. I feel like a child.
A simple sentence from ACA literature has been helping both of us get underneath the words we reach for first:
When I think I’m being ______, am I feeling ______, because I need ______?
Then there are Paul’s words, which I’ve heard a hundred times and am only now really hearing:
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4–7)
I can’t do that. I’m not sure I’m supposed to be able to. Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love” (John 15:9). A few verses earlier he said, “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Maybe love starts with being loved. Maybe it only comes through the Holy Spirit, by staying connected, again and again.
John wrote, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). I read that and wonder if my fear isn’t what disqualifies me, but what love is coming to heal.
Jesus also said that unless we turn and become like children, we will never enter the kingdom (Matthew 18:3). If I feel like a child, maybe I’m finally near the door.
I see others living this way and wonder how they do it, and whether I’ll ever get there. I don’t know. I’m trying to stay connected.
The questions I’m asking myself:
Which line of 1 Corinthians 13 is hardest for me right now?
Where does my “yeah, but” show up when someone offers love?
The last time I felt disrespected or rejected, what was I feeling underneath, and what did I need?
Who loves in a way I don’t understand yet? What do I notice about them?
Who do I wish I had loved differently?
What would it look like for me to give today, without needing anything back?