Showing Love in Desperate Times of Need… and Valentine’s Day, too!

Happy Valentine’s Day, Friends! I know everyone is sharing pictures of their significant other and saying all kids of lovey dovey mushy stuff today, but I am going to take it in another direction today and tell you about how love has looked to us lately.

As you may remember from my post last week, we have had a rough go of it lately. I had gallbladder surgery and then, two days later, Jeremy came down with the Norovirus. I have never seen him so sick. He was as white as a ghost and weak as water. I was in a lot of pain from my surgery because the pain meds they gave me weren’t doing anything, so my pain was not managed at all. I couldn’t get up on my own, much less care for the kids.

As soon as Jeremy started vomiting, I texted my best friend, Amy, asking her to pray for him and to pray that the rest of us didn’t get it. I was in so much abdominal pain at the time that the thought of vomiting made me feel panicky. My brain was mush, as I was jacked up on pain meds. I couldn’t think of what to do, except send the kids to their rooms to play far away from Jeremy and sit next to Jeremy and make sure he was ok.

You know what love looks like? It looks like Amy getting my text and she and her husband, David, deciding to give up their normal routines, comforts, and family times to offer to care for us at the risk of getting sick themselves. It looks like Amy dropping everything and driving 25 minutes to my house and being met with a house in total disarray, Jeremy sick in the bathroom, the kids wild upstairs, and me taking turns sitting in pain and hobbling around trying to gather what we needed to stay at her house. Love looks like Amy checking on my husband, helping me pack, corralling my kids, and calling an ambulance for Jeremy. It looks like calming me down when I lose it and start sobbing as the ambulance doors shut. It looks like Jeremy’s brother dropping everything to come sit with Jeremy at the hospital and spend the night with him once back home to make sure he was ok.

Love looks like Amy arriving home with the kids and I at 10pm just to have to bathe and feed my kids and get them to bed. It looks like David running to the store to get the things I had forgotten at home. It looks like checking to make sure we had anything we needed, making me dinner, and getting me comfortable. It looks like so much lost sleep. Love looks like Lysoling all.the.things.

Love looks like spending two extra hours per day in the car making sure Little Man got to school, picking up things for Jeremy and taking me home to check on him, and picking up his prescriptions. It looks like David cooking dinner after work and watching the littles while Amy was doing all the errands and school driving for us. It looks like helping me with a certain toddler who pushed the boundaries at bedtime all three nights and refused to sleep until after 10 or 11pm each night. Love looks like caring for my kids, making all our meals, providing all our transportation, and bathing my kids for three days straight. Did I mention David and Amy have three kids of their own to care for, too?

Love looks like neighbors who make homemade soup and deliver it to your door. It looks like friends and family texting to check in and offer their help. It looks like Amy (she’s a nurse) answering my many questions about post op things. It looks like Amy calming me down when I got frustrated at the situation and reminding me of God’s presence and goodness in the situation.

This Valentine’s, I can’t help but think on this kind of self sacrificial love. It’s messy. It’s not self serving. It’s hard. It is costly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s exhausting.

All of the love she and David poured out on us has repeatedly pointed me Jesus and reminded me of His work on our behalf on the cross. Just like we were desperate for help and unable to help ourselves, it reminds me that I am unable to save myself from my sins and make myself perfect. And just like the outpouring of love we received this week, Jesus came and took my sins while I was still fumbling around not knowing what to do, and paid the price for them on the cross so that I can be perfect in God’s sight.

This self sacrificial, hard, messy love was such a sweet picture to me of Jesus. I hope that on this Valentine’s Day, you enjoy all the mushy love, but you also take time to remember Jesus’ love to you on the cross. And I hope it spurs you on to love others self sacrificially, to love them in hard places when they are unlovely, and to enter into their messes so that they can get a glimpse of the love Jesus has for them.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Friends. And, David and Amy, Justin, Anna and Rodger, and friends & family, thank you, thank you, thank you! I don’t know what we would have done without you!