A Love Like Ours

“I love you.” Such a simple phrase with a huge meaning. I don’t know how you look at the phrase “I love you” but I’m a pretty selective “I love you” sayer. Honestly, I’ve only ever said “I love you” to my family and to my husband. It’s just a very serious thing to me. I never said it to any boyfriends either--except for Brian.

Our love story began with me saying I love you to him before we ever started dating. We had been best friends for years so he knew very well how big of a deal me saying that was. Brian had chased me for years and I always blew him off--for some reason it just never clicked for me. I guess all that needed to happen was for him to be taken away to college for me to realize my true feelings. I was only 17 at the time, but when I said I love you to Brian it was as if I said “I do.” I knew at that very moment that I would spend the rest of my life with him. It’s a crazy thing to know at 17, but I really did know. Now 10 or so years later we are together still with 3 beautiful children.

The word love is not very respected in our society. I feel like people don’t truly understand the meaning of love, and it wasn’t until I thought about it recently that I realized just how amazing the love between Brian and I is. I kept trying to figure out why. Why are we so “in love”? Why does our marriage work so well? Why does it seem like our love multiplies every single day? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it all has to do with our foundation. The foundation of our relationship has always been God. Even when we were just friends--our friendship was rooted in our faith. When we began dating God was always the center of our lives independently and together. We strived to follow God’s will through our dating relationship and we continue to strive to follow God’s will in our marriage.

We do it together. We have had some very hard times and some very good and happy times, but the one thing that remains the same through it all is our foundation in God that we follow together. We do some things in our marriage that very few couples do today, and quite frankly a lot of people probably think are just crazy. (more on that later) We do these things because we are faithful, not just to each other, but to God. The amazing thing about being faithful to God is that He will always provide. I don’t just mean financially but I mean in every way possible.

It seems like in today’s society marriage is just a next step. It’s not seen as a forever bond as man and wife, it’s seen as something to do and something that can be undone at any point. The crazy thing is that society really embraces this idea of undoing marriage. People are encouraged to separate and divorce all the time for all sorts of stupid reasons or no reason at all. It’s time that the faithful take over again. It’s time for marriage to be a serious thing again. It’s time that we start encouraging engaged couples to have a foundation in God. No one ever said marriage was easy--it’s time we tell young people that marriage isn’t easy, but it is worth it. It’s time that we stop taking the easy way out. Taking the right path is more often than not the hard path. It’s time to encourage morality in this ever-progressive world. It’s time to speak up and let the faithful be heard, because I don’t know about you but I’m not going down without a fight. I will continue to fight for a moral and decent world for my children to grow up in.

Love is an action not a feeling. Let’s start acting.