1 John 4:19
Today I am reminded that love is a choice. When Jesus died on the cross for us, He chose to do it. He knew that it would cost Him his life, but He also knew what His death would accomplish. His love for us had a great big price tag attached to it., but He still chose to love us.
Have you ever thought what it has “cost” others to love you? My mother lost her life when I was four and my Father died three short years later. This left my nine year old brother, my three year old sister and me, at the age of seven, all alone in this world.
My Aunt and Uncle were the people who decided to take us in and raise us. They were only nineteen and twenty years old at the time. They were not married, but they decided to get married, in order to do this. Neither one of them had been a parent before this. They didn’t have any prior experience that made them think that they could do this. The one thing that they did have was love.
Each of them loved us three children, and they cared deeply about what happened to us. We mattered to them. Our futures mattered to them. They did not want to see us split apart and placed into three different foster homes. They wanted us to be able to stay together, to be able to grow up together, and to be able to stay with our own family.
This was what they chose to do, and this decision would cost them in the years to come. Their love for us had a great big price tag attached to it, but they chose to pay that price. They sacrificed their own youth in order to rescue us in ours. They lost their freedom and they gained an extraordinary amount of responsibility in return. They had been given no warning, no training and not a whole lot of help.
During the course of raising us they encountered more than their fair share of challenges. Not only had they never been parents before, but they had never been married before either. They had not been given the advantage of raising each one of us from birth, but they had been “handed” a ready made family. Not only that, but each one of us children had been deeply traumatized and we each struggled in different ways emotionally. In some ways, this situation was a “set up” to failure, right from the very beginning. Perhaps because they were so young at the time, they really didn’t know how to “count the cost” and they simply went forward in what they felt was the right thing to do. Or maybe they had an extraordinary amount of courage, or faith… or both.
The only thing that I know is that they did love us. It is the only explanation that there is. Only love causes us to sacrifice our own lives, for the lives of others. Whether they were aware of it or not, at that time they were being Jesus to us three kids. Although they would make mistakes, and not do everything “just right”, the one thing that was right was the love that they had for us in their hearts. This love caused them to put our needs before their own. It caused them to give to us all that they had to give. It caused them to invest all that they had to invest at the time. It is love that causes ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.
This kind of love is what this Bible verse is talking about, “We love, because He first loved us.” Today I thank my Aunt and Uncle, for the love that they chose to give us. I know it cost them a lot. I also ask the Lord to help me to love others in this same way. I thank Him for loving us and then giving us the opportunity to love others in the same way. In ending, I would like to close with this verse, it is my very favorite.
“And so faith, hope and love, these three remain,
but the greatest of these is love.”
1 Corinthians 13:13
Dedicated to Janice and Arthur Diaz
Written with love by Beverley A. Napier
May 8, 2011
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