Loving by God's Grace

I love by the grace of God. I have learned from him how selfless and never-ending real love is.

Loving someone so deeply and completely isn't easy and it even causes pain. It's like your heart strings aren't your own. They are connected to the one you love. You hurt when they hurt and you expereience joy when they are happy. What you want almost becomes obsolete because you want this person to reach all the heights God has for them. You want them to succeed and not give up. You do everything you can to remove barriers. You desire to protect them even though you know that sometimes they need to experience pain in order to learn and grow. Their life personifies a really good book--you can read it a hundred times and notice something new about the storyline each time you read it.

You never really know a good book completely, no matter how many times you read it. That's why you enjoy reading it. It's the same with people and relationships. People are not static. We are ever changing, ever learning, ever developing. We want to be known. We want to share with someone who is genuinly interested what is special to us, what makes us unique, what we dream of.

When a relationship grows stagnant, it is because one person or the other has become complacent in believing they know the other person completely and there is nothing else to learn about them...they stop reading.

Loving someone means you never let the cover of their story get dusty sitting on the shelf. You frequent his or her story so many times that the evidence of your love is seen in how well worn their pages are. You work for an intimate, positive, life-giving relationship because you love someone enough to never stop reading their story.

"He who is in love is wise and becoming wiser, sees newly everytime he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson