What love costs

 From Marriage Revolution

There's a particular kind of difficulty that only the

person closest to you can create. A stranger can

annoy you for a moment and disappear. Your

spouse lives inside your daily life, close enough to

see your worst, present for every unguarded

reaction, impossible to perform for over the long

haul. The friction that creates is not a sign you

chose wrong. It's the curriculum.

We tend to imagine that love should feel natural

with the right person, that the hard moments

mean something has gone off track. But the love

Scripture actually describes is not a feeling that

arrives on its own. It's patient when patience is

expensive. It's kind when kindness isn't deserved.

It keeps no record of wrongs, which means it

deliberately stops doing the very thing our hurt

most wants to do (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). That kind

of love has to be learned, and you cannot learn it

in theory. You learn it on a real person, in a real

Tuesday, when they've disappointed you again 

and the gentle response costs you something.

This is why marriage does such deep work in us.

The spouse who is hardest to love on a given day

is, without meaning to be, God's instrument for 

teaching you what love actually costs and how far

your own falls short. And that lesson always drives

you back to the cross, because the standard is a 

love you cannot manufacture by trying harder.

Christ loved you at your least lovable, all the way

to the end, and the only way you'll ever love your

spouse like that is to keep receiving it from Him

first and passing along what you've been given.

So the next time your spouse is hard to love this

week, resist the urge to treat it is a problem with

them. Ask what God is trying to teach you in it,

and let the difficulty do its work on your own heart.

What has loving your spouse taught you that

comfort never could?

The hardest person

to love is usually the

one God assigned to

teach you what love

actually costs.