Hope Floats

Love isn't love until you give it away. Period. Living life for one's own self is not only unfulfilling, it is empty and there is nothing lasting.

Legacies of love are the richest, fullest inheritance one can ever receive. You may have seen it in the lives of your parents, grandparents, friends, or others you see.

The ones holding hands at 60, sitting in an old fashioned coffee shop, having breakfast as they have every Saturday morning. Before they go on their drive, chatting, and catching up about whatever is important to the two of them.

The couples planning for their soon wedding, after a beautiful engagement story, uniquely their own, with stars in their eyes. Hopeful.

My friends, both who have cancer, but haven't lost sight of what is important. I watch them kiss, caringly, and I am mesmerized by the depth of the message without words. I watch their spouses, picking up the slack, making sacrifices with not a shred of selfishness.

I know that road. I have been on it, albeit unsuccessfully. My friends cajole me, I am not verbal enough, not assertive enough to demand what I should. What does that mean, I wonder?

Should love have to be demanded, or does that make one desperately repulsive. I will not, for I know I already have it on a different level. I am so satisfied in that, nothing else compares.

I long for just a brief glimpse of what God declares: "I have loved you with an everlasting love, with cords of lovingkindness I have bound you unto me."

So far as the world defines love, I have lost. I will not acquiesce to becoming a pawn in a business contract. I am saved. I will wait for eternal love, and when I arrive, I will not remember any of this. Thankfully.