"The Thing About..." Thursdays: The Thing About Love

Nothing says love like goldfish, right?  My darling love sent me this picture one day and it melted my heart more than any diamond, flower, or chocolate ever could.

My favorite message from my darling love

I have hesitated to write about love.  What could a divorced woman have to say about love?

Several weeks ago my pastor said something along the lines of this:  Don't think because you are broken in a certain area that you are restricted from knowledge about that area of life.  You are valuable especially in this area because of the very experiences that broke you.
This hit home with me, big time.  My self-doubt likes to rear its ugly head and tell me I have nothing valuable to say; it likes to tell me that I can't write about organizing because every area of my home is not perfect or that I can't write about parenting because I don't have it all figured out.

I have a lot more respect for my pastor than I have for my self-doubt...so why do I listen to the latter so often?  Hmmmmmm......
So I'm writing today about love.  Deep, consuming, crazy love.  Love that makes you strong and weak at the same time, love that gives everything and takes everything, love that has only one condition:  love me back.
At 34 I found this love.  Love that I had convinced myself did not exist.  Love that I tried to tell myself was a fairytale, an illusion, a wish, a dream.  Love that includes mutual respect and admiration, love that makes you cry with joy and shout with exhilaration. 

Do you ever watch movies and think that love doesn't exist?  Of course it does.  That's why screenwriters write about it.  We all want it.  Few find it.

Look around at the people in your life today, find the love, and treasure it. 

We get so caught up in the busyness of dealing with life that we forget.  I certainly have been forgetting my darling love lately....by that I mean I have not been appreciating the love in my life, and we started getting on each other's case a lot.

Until we stopped and said, "Whats wrong with 'us'?"  And then we laughed, and cuddled, and remembered to take time to stop and love.

Perhaps having experienced marriage going off in ditch gives us a different perspective, I don't know.  I do know that we have vowed to take care of our love like it's a helpless infant in need of constant care.  I do know that we are human and we had to yank ourselves out of selfishness and getting caught up in selfishness and busyness.  (I'm the selfish one, not him.)

Grab a box of goldfish and make your own sign.  Start letting your darling love know he or she is treasured.