Often times I feel society has a skewed sense of love. To the young, love is something magical – like fairy dust. It lifts you off your feet, makes life sunnier, brighter and heightens your senses. Everything has to be going right to feel you are wonderfully ‘in love.’

However, when these feelings no longer take root in our hearts and real life [rather real love] sets in, these feelings are cast aside and love is forgotten.

Did we miss the part in the Bible which states, ‘love is long suffering’? 

Love has become more about the experience you have – rather than the commitment you make. To the world, it’s more about the happiness than the grief, the excitement more than the mundane.

But, love is not love unless it truly encompasses all those feelings. Love is not just a pristine vase full of sea glass hearts. It’s messy, yet beautiful all at the same time.

It’s grieving with your spouse when he or she has lost their job. It’s encouraging a child who is afraid to start a new school. It’s holding a wrinkled and worn hand and looking into the aging eyes of your loved one, or just sitting there, in silence, when a friend is in tears.

True love is the picture of Christ’s hands and feet nailed to a cross and blood flowing down from His divine head of thorns. That was not pretty – that was messy and real. It was not a storybook or an instagram moment. Rather it was heart wrenching, earth shattering and a long suffering moment.

Love is both pretty and sometimes tattered. How vain to walk away when the stitches are loose. 

Like the Skin Horse said to The Velveteen Rabbit:

‘It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”  [Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit]