As people, what often defines our love for one another are not the things that we agree with, but the characteristics that frustrate us, the ones we love each other for anyway...
After lifetimes with loved ones, we learn to accept these things as well as their most noble qualities in who they are. We learn to love them not in spite of their humanness, but as much, because of it...
To me, this ability, this natural inclination we all have to love the imperfections that define each other, because without them, we all would be someone else... Is greater than us alone...
It seems grander than human nature, perhaps a quality that could only come from ...
... God?
I think about the Prodigal Son and the love of his father. The heartbroken dad who stood on a hill and rejoiced from the first sight of his waywards sons return and never stopped. He was well aware of the sin his son carried and had a living contrast, still in his home, in his eldest, obedient son, to compare... but the love for his less perfect child, never wavered or waned...
It was a different love than he had for his eldest, it was larger in scope, complete in wholeness of vision. Sometimes, we love those more, that we forgive more... We find a tendency not our own, but gifted from our loving Creator. We love not the sin, but the entire sinner..
I remember how God loved us all enough to send His only Son, Whom He was well pleased, to die for the unrepentant and undeserved. He did not die for us in spite of our sins, but because of them...
It's funny how in our younger years, the frustration of differences between family members is nearly overpowering.
My middle son cannot wait to get away from his younger brother. Any amount of time separating the two, is seen by him, as a blessed reprieve...
I had two older brothers who saw me the exact same way. My Wonderful Wife had three older sisters that were like minded. I hear this eternally repeated tale from almost every family member and friend or perfect stranger that I have ever talked to.. It could almost be considered universal.
After nearly fifty years my brothers and i have found that somehow those differences eventually disappeaed or just became kind of comically acceptable.
There have been moments in reminiscing that we spoke of those times with a strange affection...
Time is an amazingly precious thing. Not just for the opportunities it gives us, but for the way it changes the unpleasant realities we knew in the past into strangely sanitized and happily remembered, cartoon-ish pages of Sunday comic memories..
How it pulls us together in a love, developed thru years of gentle dilution of angers past..
How the people we could not picture spending another minute together with then, become those whose presence now, we cherish and incomprehensibly, crave...
If we are lucky, we have those moments as the old garbage passes and we find the hidden and forgotten treasures that were buried beneath...
I remember in my early twenties, lamenting about some of the bad times that happened in our house, growing up. We were at my moms trailer and my parents divorce was still stinging everyone. It was that stage of blame and regret on all sides, trying to make sense out of a season of pain everyone still felt trapped in. Finally, my mom had enough. Enough of the guilt, enough of the shame, enough of all of us, herself included, seeing the last twenty years as an epic failure.
" If you take away all the bad" she screamed, " What do you have left" !?!?
" If you take away all the bad, what do you have left"?
I think that is exactly what time does for us, if we let it...
So, in looking back thru the mirror that can make the pain appear smaller than it actually was, don't fight it by insisting on perfect accuracy... Accept it's gift...
I love my mom with all my heart. In posts past, I shared that much of my hardness and strength came from her teachings. I forgot to mention the most precious of all the lessons she gave me, one day, in some of her worst emotional pain...
" If you take away all of the bad, what do you have left"?
Today, I share this with you...
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