Love sows, but reaps in loss
WATCHING my wife work on a labor of love – curating an album for our Nathanael Marcus – in the middle of a special day for deceased babies (from my unique point of view) – and I learn something new, again.
Loves sows … but reaps lost.
She goes out of her way, loves and creates something so extraordinary that she gives herself completely for another, only to eventually lose that other. In the end, love loses. But we cannot live without love, since God is love and, when we are true to ourselves, we cannot help but recognize the obviousness of God.
Love is a debtor who plays a serious game. There is no insignificant investment of emotion, spirit, strength, faithfulness, grace, patience, kindness, meekness, and a servant’s heart in love. Love gives everything without regrets, without concessions, without thinking about loss. But love must lose.
That does not mean that loving is losing on the path of life. Love directs our paths and is the reason we have some hope, some strength of faith, and some meaning for life.
But love must lose. You must suffer a loss, because to love is to win, but to win means that we will eventually suffer the worst indignity: to see the love that was built evaporate before our eyes!
But still, we cannot live life and enjoy it the best we can without love.
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As I experienced my dear, select and place those pictorial records of the birth of our son, a birth that did not work out well, for which it cannot be denied, which is an ugly truth to accept, but the one that must be accepted, because there is there is no logic in not accepting what cannot be changed (sorry for the long sentence) – I heard the silent righteousness of God as in the voice of the Old Testament book, Ecclesiastes.
There is a refreshment in a heartbreaking truth that somehow we cannot change what is horrendous to know: our love has lost. When we understand that the LORD gives, as the LORD takes away, blessed are we, as Job says, when we can say, “Blessed be the Name of the LORD!”
The LORD is the giver of every perfect gift, and love is perfection in the gift.
When God gave Nathanael to us, and then before we received him, God took him away, we received a love that overcomes its own tragic loss. We have very real possession of his memory until we find him alive in heaven.
© 2015 SJ Wickham.
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