Is This Love?

Is this love, is this love that I’m feeling? The question of a lifetime. Those two pictures above were taken at a season in my life when someone felt they loved me. They were the ones who took the pictures. I seemed happy, didn’t I? Now in retrospect, the wiser me wonders. Was it love? What is this ‘many splendored thing’ that so many pursue, ache for and I dare say – even kill for? Many have become prisoners of hope – the hope that one day they’ll find that one. Today the hopeless romantic may find him or herself searching for love in all the wrong places. Tomorrow may bring with it pain, misunderstanding or unrealistic expectations. Or by chance it may bring joy, ecstasy, and a sense of ‘home’. The poet said ‘it’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’ Was it love that we lost or just an illusion of all the suppositions we conjured up in our minds. Did reality live up to those expectations?

As the world celebrates, today you may have found yourself peacefully ‘at home’ with what you were dealt. Maybe you now have all you’ve longed for. Your dream became your reality. Or maybe you’ve just settled to accept that yours is lacking in many ways. You’ve told yourself ‘it is what it is’. I’ll keep these cards. Or you may be the one who still believes in the kind of love that makes you smile and cry at the same time. You want to run yet you can’t help but stay. You feel safe but overwhelmed by the depth of this thing that won’t let you go. I pray you find what you’ve been searching for. If you have, guard it and hold it carefully. Many have yet to find it.

What is this I sense
Coursing through my being
A contented discontentment
Knocking me off my feet
In pleasurably uncomfortable ways
My appetite wanes
Diminishing and disappearing
The inner me is filled
There’s only space for you

A hundred miles an hour
Thoughts of you running
Through my head
This warrior has no armor
She fights a losing battle
Surrenders to a power
Bigger than herself
Is this the love
I was warned about?

“The greatest of these is love.” [ 1Corinthians 13:13]