Get Real with God ~ Loving the Unexpected

“The older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things—that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children…” Titus 2: 3-4

I wonder why Paul wrote this. Why did the younger women need to be taught to love their children? I have an idea…because sometimes it’s just hard to love. I never knew how deeply I could love until I had a baby, and I didn’t know how that love would grow with each baby. But each of my children have been difficult to love at some point. As an infant, my second son did not like to be held, he liked to nurse, but that was it—no snuggles, no hugs, didn’t want to sit on my lap, nothing. That child made me feel like such an awful mother, “Why doesn’t he love me? What am I doing wrong?” Another child I have, when he was 3 and 4, pulled the kind of rage out of me that Proverbs warns against. How can a mother feel that way about her child? As time has passed, I realized that with my second baby, it wasn’t about me; it was about who he was. As a young man, he’s still not affectionate, but he will talk to me for hours. I KNOW he loves me. The other child, who was literally driving me crazy, just needed some fish oil to “mellow out.” How much better it would have been if an older woman could have told me these things. I wouldn’t have felt so awful and I would have recognized that by staying faithful to them, through the difficult times I was loving them, just not in the way I expected.

“Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, and endures all things.
LOVE NEVER FAILS.”