A SMALL CONVERTED GARAGE was our first home as a married couple, but to us it was our castle. In those early days of our marriage life was simpler. Not much money, but lots of love and desire.
In those first few months I worked as a department manager in a large retail store making $3.10 an hour. That income didn’t leave much for frills and gifts of affection, but often, while riding my moped home, I would pull off the side of the road at a undeveloped field and grab a handful of wildflowers (some may call them weeds) to present to Linda as I arrived home.
Now, the amazing thing was not that I brought wildflowers home to my new wife, but that she accepted them as if they were a dozen red roses in a gold box with a satin ribbon. What still catches by breath away is that she still welcomes my often silly attempts of expressing my love, but that’s the way real love is, is it not? Real love makes a feast out of sharing a twenty-five cent hamburger at Mc Donald’s or a high-roller vacation out of an afternoon drive through the southern California foothills. Ah, for a return to those days!
I believe this is what the Lord is calling the church to in the Book of Revelation, “I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” (Revelation 2:2-5) There it is: Do the things you did at first.
Too often life, and love, gets complicated and in the process we lose the depth and simplicity of love. The call is for us to return, and to focus upon that which is of true importance: to give ourselves fully to other person, to see them first, and in the simplest of ways live a life that expresses in both word and deed, “I love you.”