Love is something that many of us just don’t get. We don’t understand
it. We think it’s all about butterflies, shooting stars and orchestra’s playing
in the back ground when we kiss every time.
The truth about love is it’s really none of those things.
Sure they may happen in movies but in reality love is about sacrifice. The
greatest love you’ll ever know happened from a sacrifice that God put in
place. He sent his own son to come here
to die for us because he loved us. There were no shooting stars when it
happened, no orchestra playing romantic music in the back ground and no
butterflies. The truth is the sky went
black as night, people shouted blasphemy the whole time and the only things
flying around were probably flies and vultures.
In this picture of love, it was the greatest love ever given
to us. We didn’t deserve it! The same goes for relationships even here and now.
Our marriages, boyfriends or other loved ones shouldn’t have to ‘prove’ their
love for us. Honestly, I don’t deserve an ounce of the love my husband gives
me. Don’t get me wrong I’m so thankful that God has given him the ability to
love me, but I am so undeserving of it more than I am deserving.
My husband is awesome. Sure, he makes mistakes (he’s only
human) but he sacrifices a lot for me. He sacrifices time, money and tons of
effort to make sure our relationship works. Now, when we first got married I
did not even care that most of this happened. I will put it out there. I was so
selfish. I wasn’t even in love with him. I was in love with the idea of being
in love. I was in love with the idea of being married. But honestly, and he
knows this, I was not in love with him.
It’s sad, so sad I know but I learned so much from it. He was doing all
of these things for me because he loved me, he seriously fought for our
marriage.
I kept telling myself he didn’t love me that if he loved me
he would be doing so much more for me, that he would fight for our marriage that
he would do everything I wanted him to. I thought that there would be shooting
stars and romantic orchestra music in my mind and that in all terms of romance
he would be that wonderful guy. The problem
was I wasn’t living in reality. I knew that those things happened in fairytales
but eventually real life would take over and that stuff wouldn’t happen every
day.
When we started going to church and we both started living
our lives for pleasing Christ and not others I really was struggling with myself
internally because I knew that I wasn’t in
love with my husband the way I should be. I wasn’t even sure I loved him
all that much. Sure I liked him and I
could tolerate living with him and he was a great guy but, love, that one just
had me stuck. So I prayed and prayed and
boy did I ask God to ever change my heart and my mind in the way I saw my
husband.
A couple weeks into my desperation for God to change my
heart regarding the way I looked at my husband and felt about my husband it
dawned on me. I saw him doing all of
these things for me just simply because he loved me. I had never noticed all the things he had
done for me and for our child before. Yes, I will admit I was that
selfish. Sure prior to this I knew he
was a great guy but in all honesty I really didn’t see him doing enough for us.
But, in the long run he was doing way more than enough. Who was I to think he
needed to fight for me? Who was I to think that the world and our marriage
should revolve around my happiness?
In that moment it dawned on me ever so clear. Love wasn’t about what he could do for me to
get me to fall in love with him. It was about what I could do for Matt to make
sure his happiness was fulfilled. I
stopped trying to be so selfish. I tried to make sure that I did my fair share
of helping out around the house, and making sure he got him some alone time too
and I started sacrificing things I wanted so he could have some things he
wanted. I started actually fighting for his happiness. It was different than I
had ever thought. When I started doing things for him because I was concerned
about his happiness I realized that the more I worked and strived to make him
happy and content the more I fell in love with my own husband.
There was no real defining moment of shooting stars and butterflies
and rainbows and all the romance but there definitely was a day when I woke up
and realized that I really had finally fallen in love with the guy I married.
He was a great guy and I knew that from the start, but he became an even
greater guy than I had imagined when I let go of my selfishness and started
trying to actually love him. I stopped focusing on what he wasn’t doing for me
and instead I started focusing on what I wasn’t doing for him but what I should
be doing for him.
There still isn’t always romance in the air, but I do see it
much more now than I did when I was the selfish one in the relationship. I hear so often women who are like I was,
saying that their husband’s aren’t doing certain things that they need to in
order know that they are loved. Here are
my thoughts to that, start doing things for him and you’ll learn to find ways
to love him, ways in which you never dreamed possible. Stop looking for the fairytale and help write
a new love story that would make the fairytale seem like a child’s dream
because in all honesty that is what a fairytale is. You have the ability to make a love story far
greater than you’ll ever see in any movie. You just have to stop trying to make your life
a movie. Man made movies and the dreams
in those movies, and God can make so much better than that if you just
surrender the idea of what you have and let him fulfill his dreams in your love
life.
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