Love is an action, not a feeling. Love is picking your little boy up from school ready to blow. Love is staying calm as he's yelling at you & the world while you wait for him to buckle his seat belt. Love is making sure all the other kids are taken care of so you can sit and listen to your boy rage at the world. Love is once getting the others taken care of going upstairs only to find your boy has run back outside. Love is bringing him back into his room and telling him he has a choice and you're there to listen when he's ready. It's seeing he can't calm down and having him lay out on the floor while you massage his back. Love is with every fiber of your being wanting to erupt like Mt St Helen's and forcing it back. It's dying to yourself, your own selfish desires and expectations. It is putting somebody else's needs before your own. And then the beauty of love is when you get it right, even just for a minute... When the tears stop, the world takes a breath and a little boy apologizes. The apology is sincere, but the result only lasts a moment, until the next disappointment, because today is one of those days.
One of those days were even the simplest answer is met with rage, tears and yelling. Where you are mystified and you have nothing. Nothing but the resolve to let love win today. I will let love win today if it kills me. I will hear every last yell of how terrible I am and I will not let it win. I know that this is not logic speaking, it is not my son speaking & that no matter how I fight it I will lose. But I will be a bigger loser if I do not let love win, maybe someday he will look back and see that love won. Maybe he will see how no matter out of line he was today that his mother didn't react in anger, she reacted in love... And maybe someday that will mean something to him.
Until that day I will hold onto that little glistening hope that this too shall pass. Because today that is all the hope I have. I am tired and I am broken. But somewhere in the midst of this I love. I am not loving by my own strength today, mine is gone. I have nothing else to hold onto but that His love is stronger than mine. God has seen me through many storms and he will see me through this as well. I will fail constantly, but I will remember this high within the storm because today the storm didn't beat me and that's not something I can say everyday. So, thank you, Lord, for showing me that in our darkest hours your love can still and will still prevail. And you love to make broken things new, into something more beautiful than imaginable... I cannot wait to see what you turn my son into and even me through this process as well. You must have something beautiful for us, I just know it.
