Love Stories

When you see true, genuine, better-than-fairytale-because-it’s-real love, you know it. It sticks out like a sore thumb in this world. It’s hard to miss. I know – I’ve seen it. I know women who married princes. Those princes may not have come with crowns and gold, but they are royalty and they treat their wives like royalty.

Many years ago, before I was married (back when I didn’t want to be married), I heard one of those women tell a story that changed my life. She’d come home from work exhausted and had fallen asleep. She slept right through the time she was supposed to pick up her husband from work. That night, he trudged home in the pouring rain. These were the days before cell phones and I’m sure he was wondering what had happened. When he walked through the door and found her asleep on the couch, his only words to his wife were heartfelt:

“Oh, I’m so glad you got some rest!”

When I heard that, I quietly said to God, “If I am to be married, it must be to a man like that.” And that is exactly what happened. Not too long after I heard that story, I married a man whose head is princely, whose heart is gold and whose soul smells of honey. I know a prince when I see one.

I have another friend whose marriage radiates such overwhelming love that everywhere she and her husband go, people can’t take their eyes off them. People stare at them. People eavesdrop on them. True love is irresistable. When these two were newlyweds, strangers told them it would wear off, but my friends rejected that unhappy ending and well over a decade later, they’re still drawing eyes and ears because that’s what love does – it draws us all in.

These are wonderful, amazing women, but they didn’t earn a better love story than anybody else – they just put down their own pens and let God write their stories. And nobody can write one like He can. He’s written an eternity full of stories. He’s written a whole universe full of stories. Some of them He hand-picked to put in a Book you may recognize. And He’s still writing stories – true stories of victory and acts of heroism and acts of selfless sacrifice, of generosity, of redemption and forgiveness and of reconciliation… But they’re all part of the same big story, and at it’s heart, it’s a love story. It's The Love Story.  You won’t find a better author for your life and your love.

About a year ago, the couple with the walk-home-in-the-rain story came to our house to stay for the weekend. We had a wonderful few days filled with laughter and food and music, but for me, the pinnacle was the snowy walk we took together down to the river. The men pulled the children on sleds. We women wandered along with our cameras and no one was in a hurry. She took this picture of our princes in the snow and the caption wrote itself in my heart. True Love was out for a stroll and even the sky had to do something to acknowledge its presence.

They were two good men without an ounce of guile between them and on that happy winter day, their hearts were as light and as white as the snowflakes.

Ambushed by the Author of Life and Love,

Kimberly