Love Never Fails

I'd heard it before at weddings.  It always made me cringe.  In fact, I think I heard it at every wedding I'd ever been to.  You've heard it too..."Love is patient, love is kind, blah, blah, yada, ya."  It always seemed so...sappy.  Like, so sweet that maybe you might have to throw up in your mouth a little.  I had always said that I would never have someone read or say this at my wedding.

God is funny.

When Adam was at basic training for 4 months, we got to talk on the phone for, I think, a grand total of 45 minutes.  Yup, you read that right.  45.  Minutes.  Most of which was the highlights of my disasterous life back home...where the heat went out (with a wind chill of 20 below) and my car battery died (because of the cold) and someone crashed into his car (then there was an ice storm).  All conversations take place where it sounds like my beloved is in the bottom of a tin can.  A tin can full of about a hundred other people.  Fun.

We usually talk every day.  We talk about everything.  We talk about nothing.  But we talk.  We check in.  We send cutesy little texts. 

We had to learn a different way.  Which, in the end, was a little fun.  Not my preference.  But a different kind of fun. 

One of the things I did for the Valentine's Day when he was gone was that I wrote out the entire verse of I Corinthians 13:4-8a.  Yup, the one that made me figuratively puke in my mouth.  As I was reading it, there were something that stuck out for me.  A lot of things that stuck out for me.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.

Did you catch that? ALWAYS protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres. Always. And I'm pretty sure that God's idea of ALWAYS is a bit more vast than what I can even comprehened! Wait, that last part....love NEVER fails. Whoa. Big stuff. Profound stuff. Life-changing stuff. Love-changing stuff. 

The only problem was that I wrote it on an index card in red Sharpie marker.  Not knowing that, for a very long time during basic training, Adam would only have a red flashlight to read his mail at night. 

Red flashlight + red Sharpie = invisible ink.  Dang it.

He called one night and said, "Why did you send me a blank index card?" 

On our wedding day, I gave all of my bridesmaids necklaces that said, "Love never fails" on them. 

And here is my best friend, Jessica, reading the verse at our wedding.

God is funny.