When Love Calls Your Name

It didn't happen over night, this enduring love since the year 1970. It started out as a confession, slipped casually from a classmate during a high school football game,"I think he likes you." This boy who played baseball and drove a bright red Volkswagen Beetle. At the ensuing dance inside the school, the beat of "American Woman" ricocheting off gymnasium walls, swishing my bell-bottoms, ushering us both onto the road map of our lives. Two teens, both student drivers. And when we sat together on a recent February evening, watching a television show I normally roll my eyes at, I developed a keener appreciation for the man who called out my name, searching the dance floor for a girl he "liked," oh those many years past.

In the television episode, the wife lamented over her husband's lack of compassion towards her, his lack of verbal or physical affection especially when she was injured, physically or emotionally. I snuck a glance at my husband who wore a guilty expression pasted on his face. I smiled wide. But it turned out the character and my husband have something in common, as later in the episode the wife learns her husband's love language speaks differently than hers, the same quantity of love, just dissimilar. Casting another look my husband's way, his knowing grin gaily announced the verdict. He fully comprehended the moral of this story. I was undone!

Love is always having to say your sorry, folding someones laundry even if your angry self would rather toss the clothes onto the wet driveway. Out into the inky dark night. It means putting the needs of others ahead of your own, even if your idea of a glorious day morphed into a day of shopping for make-up and hair products. At more than one store. It means working behind the scenes, humbly, tirelessly, living the mundane, the ordinary, flexing courage muscles, keeping your focus on the other.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." ~Lau Tzu~

 

And this is why I give thanks for the man who searched me out on a dance floor when I was sixteen. Who pretends not to notice my tears, but wipes them anyway, in his own loving way.

 

 

He bought me gifts in our teen-age years, simple yet bold, powerful proclamations, a forecast of  our lives together. He speaks a foreign love language, one that still needs translation at times. But like the husband and wife on television, love paints pretty when Grace gently, beautifully, leads you back out onto the dance floor. One merciful step at a time.