Love Sows, Yet Reaps In Loss

Watching my wife at work on a labour of love — the curating of an album for our Nathanael Marcus — in the midst of a special day for deceased infants (from my unique viewpoint) — and I learn something new, again.

Loves sows... yet it reaps in loss.

She goes out of her way, does love, and creates something so remarkable as to give itself wholly for another, only to eventually lose that other. Ultimately, love loses. But we cannot live without love, given that God is love, and, when we are true to ourselves, we cannot help acknowledge the obviousness of God.

Love is a debtor who plays a serious game. There is no insignificant investment of emotion, spirit, fortitude, faithfulness, grace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and servant-heartedness in love. Love gives all without regret, without compromise, without thought for loss. But love must lose.

That’s not to say that to love is to lose in the way of life. Love directs our paths and it’s the very reason we have any hope at all, any strength of faith, and any meaning for life.

But love must lose. It must suffer loss, for to love is to gain, but to gain means we will eventually suffer the worst indignity — to see the love that was built up evaporate before our eyes!

But, still, we cannot live life and enjoy it the best we can without love.

***

As I experienced my darling select and place those pictorial records of our son’s birth — a birth that did not work out well, for which there is no denying, which is an ugly truth to accept, but that which must be accepted, for there is no logic in not accepting what cannot be changed (sorry for the long sentence) — I heard God’s silent rectitude as if in the voice of the Old Testament book, Ecclesiastes.

There is refreshment in a harrowing truth that somehow we cannot change that which is horrendous to know: our love has lost. When we understand that the Lord gives, just as the Lord takes away, blessed are we — as Job says — when we can say, “Blessed be the Name of the Lord!”

The Lord is the giver of every perfect gift, and love is the perfection in the gift.

When God gave us Nathanael, and, then before we received him, God took him away, we received a love that conquers its own tragic loss. We have the very real possession of his memory until we meet him alive in heaven.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.