I have a love-hate relationship with New Years. I love the celebration, the innate recognition that nothing is promised. New Years is a time when people come together and collectively sigh… “We made it, somehow.” Whether they know it or not, the New Years celebration is at heart a celebration of grace and mercy. I love that. Still I hate New Years. I hate the resolutions. I hate the “new beginnings”. I don’t hate it because it’s a bad thing. I don’t hate it because resolutions are made to be broken. I hate it because it is an almost innate recognition of depravity. We are lacking something. This is utterly true, I know it, but being confronted with your own depravity is never fun. Still it’s vital. I look back at the past year (as well as the sum of all the years prior) and find that I don’t know how to love, especially my wife. There are a bevy of excuses I could use but the reality is that my broken, cursed heart seeks itself and its good over all else and must be trained to do otherwise.
I love my wife. I love the compassion that drives her not only to travel around the world, but also to sit at home and make bead necklaces to sell for orphans. I love how passionate she gets about little things and how she’ll stay up late at night painting a room or mod podge-ing felt birds to a canvas. I love how smart she is and how she sees things in Scripture and in movies that I just don’t see and have to pretend like I did. I love how competitive she is and that she’ll get mad at me for throwing a game of scrabble. Mostly I love how she loves my daughter, so much so that she gets up at 5:30 am everyday and goes to work with Hazel to supplement the rest of our income needs. I love that I couldn’t survive without her. I love my wife.
Still, in spite of all that, I don’t do the things that love does. It’s like love is a language so foreign that my tongue no longer even has capability of making all the sounds necessary for intelligible speech. New Years reminds me of that. It reminds me that it takes discipline and diligence to love. It reminds me that I have to be taught to love. It forces me to come to grips with those things and even, to do something about them. It is in fact what you do to the people you say you love that counts. I hate resolutions and so I won’t make one. Still I will do the things necessary to love her. I will train my tongue to speak love. I will love my wife.
So you resolve to love your wife.
I think you are more than half way to loving not only your wife, but your brothers and sisters in Christ, because you know it is not something that comes to man naturally. This leads me to believe that we cannot draw on our own strength and ability, but must seek it in God’s grace and His love.
In other word, your resolve should be to depend more on God to show you how to love your wife better. (smile)