what love requires.

I threw this up on our letterboard last month, completely unaware of what would unfold in the weeks to come.

Love is requiring a lot of us right now. It’s requiring a lot of our marriages, our mothering, our children themselves. Love is requiring a lot of the world, the hospitals, the grocery stores, our neighbors and friends.

Love is requiring a lot of faith in these uncertain times.

It’s easy to slip into anxiety, bitterness, sadness, fear. I have felt all of those things this week, fully aware of my own privilege in being disappointed over little things like my canceled birthday dinner and a postponed haircut.

The days are long.
The kids are restless.
I’m already starting to feel claustrophobic in this house.
Lonely, depressed.
We’ve only just begun.

Every day, I repeat:

This is what love requires of me today.
This is what love requires of me today.
This is what love requires of me today.

We are mothers; we keep going. We make more food, we brave the stores, we check in with neighbors, Facetime the grandparents. We rock the baby, read more books, rotate the laundry, pick crayons up off the floor. Over and over, and over and over. We paste Shamrocks in the windows, make magic for the neighborhood. Let’s do rainbows next week, what about Christmas lights? We talk to the kids huddled on our bed, explain what we understand, pray over what we don’t. We fight our own anxious hearts, our unruly souls, our inability to focus on anything but here and now and today. We give it all to One who already knows.

This is what love requires of us today.
This is what love requires of us today.
This is what love requires of us today.

We keep going.
We know how to love.

We love because He first loved us.