Love is a verb
I think it was last summer when I ordered this book, Love is a Verb, by Gary Chapman, (also the author of The Five Love Languages!). It sat on my stack filled of other non-fiction I couldn’t bring myself to read. Especially during pregnancy and quarantine, reading anything, especially a non-fiction, just wasn’t happening. Finally, a few weeks ago, right as the beautiful weather lifted our moods, I pulled it out. It was captivating! Light, easy read, but completely transformational. It’s filled with real life “stories of what happens when loves comes alive,” mostly focusing on marriage, with other relationships sprinkled in. I basically bookmarked every chapter, it was that good. One of my favorite stories was titled, “Drinking Milk with a Spoon.” It was about a woman who fell into a pattern of finding negative traits about her husband, always pointing out the things that annoyed her about him, in this case, when he would drink milk with a spoon. At a breaking point, she decides to make a list of the negative and positive traits about both her husband and herself. She admits how much longer her own con list was, and how much longer the pro side was for her husband. She decides to literally burn (throws in her burning fireplace!) the negative list of her husband, and carry around the positive traits of him in her pocket. She starts a habit of pulling out that list when she is annoyed, and adds to it often. Over weeks and months of this, her heart (not surprisingly) changes, and her husband (surprisingly) stops drinking milk with a spoon. That little story reminded me see how easy it is to focus on negative traits, either in our spouse, ourselves, or anyone close to us in life; and how that deliberate choice of focusing on the positive brings real and transformative change. We all know that love is not a feeling, but a choice. Sometimes it’s hard to understand or remember that until we see (or read) real examples of how that’s lived out. These stories show that love in action. They remind us how the small changes within ourselves are the ripple into our personal lives, and the lives in our broken world. I wish I could paid to advertise this, haha, because I would yell from the rooftops this is a perfect read for all of us this summer, and $10 I don’t think you’d regret :)
It reminds us how we all have to decide to choose love.
Love is a verb.
