Love sows, but reaps losses

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.

He loves sows… but reaps losses.

He goes out of his way, loves and creates something so remarkable as to give himself completely to another, only to ultimately 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 fail to recognize the evidence 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 servant heart in love. Love gives everything without regret, without compromise, without thinking of loss. But love must lose.

That does not mean that loving is getting lost on the path of life. Love directs our paths and is the reason we have any hope, any strength of faith, and any meaning to life.

But love must lose. He must suffer loss, because to love is to win, but winning means that we will finally suffer the worst indignity: to see the love that was built evaporate before our eyes!

But still, we cannot live life and enjoy it to the best of our ability without love.

***

While I was experimenting, my beloved, select and place those pictorial records of the birth of our son, a birth that did not work out well, for which there is no denying, which is an ugly truth to accept, but which must be accepted, because there is no there is 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 refreshment in a heartbreaking truth that somehow we cannot change what is horrible to know: our love has been lost. When we understand that the LORD gives, just 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 us Nathanael, 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.