There’s something about coming to church on a Sunday when you’ve just watched people celebrate something beautiful. Two couples who have been married sixty years. Sixty. And you sit there thinking about what that means—all the ordinary Tuesdays, all the mornings you didn’t want to get out of bed, all the times you stayed anyway.
But we were also holding space for someone on hospice care. Sleeping peacefully. Unresponsive. And her husband sitting there with her, or her daughter, or whoever it was, just keeping vigil. Just being present.
That’s what love is, you know. It’s not the greeting card version. It’s not even the celebration-at-the-anniversary version, though that matters. It’s the showing up when there’s nothing left to do but show up. It’s the choosing, over and over again, to lay your own need aside and just be with somebody.
I think that’s why Jesus came the way he did. Not as a mighty king who fixed everything from a distance. But as someone willing to get tired, to get hungry, to sit at tables with people the respectable folks wouldn’t touch. To eventually let it cost him everything.
When you love somebody—really love them—you’re vulnerable. You can be disappointed. You can lose them. And yet. And yet we keep doing it. Because the alternative, which is to protect yourself by not loving, it turns out that’s a slow death too. Just a different kind.
So maybe the call is not to love more carefully. Maybe it’s to love more honestly, knowing what it costs.
A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope