Love Is...

Love does not always look the way we think that it should.  Most women enjoy a nice sappy, romantic “chick flick”.  It is so very easy for us to get caught up in how romantic and loving the leading men tend to be.  They usually make some huge display of love or even lots of them.  Or within just a few short hours of a movie they crack open their hard shell and jump into love.  All of these things add up to a good romantic movie and entertain us, but in real life love isn’t always shown so obviously.

Please don’t misunderstand, my husband loves me so very much, but his way of showing love is so very different than anything I see in the movies.  It has taken me longer than I’d really like to admit to really see just how much my husband loves me because I have been caught up in looking for the big romantic gestures.  But God made my husband uniquely different.  Once the Lord began to show me the ways in which my husband does show me love, it was an awesome and truly eye opening experience. 

Love isn’t always flowers, romantic dinners, moonlit strolls and all the other clichés that we always assume means we are loved.  It can be standing in Wal-Mart for an extra half hour (a little annoyed at the time) while he researches that vacuum on his phone to make sure that I am not just getting one, but getting a good one!  It’s helping me rearrange my living room a million times until I am happy, because he liked it 20 times ago.  It’s bringing me a Dr. Pepper when I have had a bad day, because that fixes everything.  When he gets my favorite whatever at the grocery store, where he just went shopping so I didn’t have to drag everyone out.  It is when he watches the girls while I go do something alone, so that I can re-charge.  It’s trying to let me sleep in from time to time.  It’s when he remembers something I said I wanted six months ago and gets me the perfect birthday or Christmas present.  It’s that he knows me so well it takes me by surprise. 

So while I do get those obvious gestures of love, the best ways in which my husband shows me his love is not only in those obvious ways.  The most amazing ways I am showed how much I am loved are actually in the seemingly small everyday things that happen!

My encouragement this Valentine’s Day is to take a moment to reflect on your spouse.  Let the Lord show you all the “small” ways you are being shown love each and every day.  Really let yourself see what the Lord is showing you.  He may bring something to mind and your first instinct is to look at that instance as just a normal thing that always happens.  That is the beauty of it, God created us all so differently, it could just look like some quirky thing because that’s who we are.  I mean when we were standing in Wal-Mart while Steven was dutifully researching the vacuum, I admit at the time I was kind of annoyed and just thought, let’s buy this thing and move on!!  It was probably a few weeks later that I realized he wasn’t doing that to make sure money was spent wisely; it was his way of saying I love you and I want to make sure this will work for you. Turns out that vacuum was truly remarkable. So truly pay attention, the smallest and seemingly insignificant things could just be the most significant ways you are being told I love you!!