{Marriage Week} Choose Love.

Written By: Marnie Pouget

This is truth.

  
When you get past the “falling in love” feeling.  When one of you has morning breath bad enough to knock out your favourite pet.  When fever and vomiting hit hard.  When the bathroom smells like a rodent died in there.  When the sense of humour you thought was hilarious when you dated is just plain old…..and annoying.

When the sarcasm and wit hit too close to home and cut to the core.  When liking each other seems impossible.

Choose to love.

A young woman told me that she only wanted to marry someone with whom she would have those “in love” feelings forever.  If she “fell out of love”, she would leave.

I was saddened by this.  She would not hear my reasoning.  She has set herself up for a lifetime of disappointment and relationships that don’t last.

The reality is that love is a choice.

When he is at his worst, I choose to love my husband.  I choose to be attracted to him.  I choose to keep my desires for him.  I choose to respond with kind words and compassion.  I choose to keep lines of communication open (and since I am a selfish human being – sometimes I don’t and boy, are those times lousy and not worth the lack of investment – time filled with regret that needs to be followed by repentance and renewal).

How thankful I am that my beloved does the same for me.  Believe it or not, there are days that I am not very lovable.  I am critical and unkind.  I am thoughtless and self-centred.  I have lazy days when I fail to shower and I am sure I do not always smell like roses.  I know in those moments that he is not instinctively thinking about how amazingly beautiful I am and how lucky he is to have captured my attention and won my heart.

But he chooses to think these things.

Love isn’t about how you feel.  It is a commitment to put another as a priority in your life, to care for and to prefer.  1 Corinthians 13 gives a wonderful description of perfect love.  We can strive for this and we will never love perfectly.  But we can love.  We can choose love.  We can grow in love.  Deep, lasting, enduring love.

We can also choose to feel love – the fluttery, starry eyed sweetness of new, “young” love.

I have an enduring friendship with my husband.  We have weathered storms and our love is deeper and stronger than it was the day we married.  Even still, I choose to react to him with the same thrill that I had when we began.

He still makes my eyes shine, I feel warm and safe when he holds my hand and my heart still quickens at his kiss.

I choose to love and to “be in love” and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

About Marnie: 

Marnie has had a desire to be a positive influence in the lives young women. Discipleship is an important aspect of the Great Commission that is often overlooked. There were women throughout Marnie’s life that took time to invest in her spiritual growth, teaching and encouraging her. She now follows their example by intentionally investing in the lives of other young women.

Marnie is a mom of five children and has been married to her best friend for almost 20 years. She has a love for reading and photography and is passionate about the ministry of Bair Lake Bible Camp. She blogs irregularly at http://thelittlehilllife.blogspot.ca/.