Love Never Gives Up — Lisa Brockman

Our youngest daughters and I had just arrived home from a 10-day vacation with my parents when one of them addressed her brother.

“Cole, did you miss me?” she playfully asked. He was caught off guard by her question.

“Uh, yeah, I missed you.” he responded a bit bewildered. She’d never asked him a question like that before.

“Well, I missed you!” she declared with a smile.

Redemption was unfolding before my unexpected eyes. I worked to keep my body nonchalant while my heart felt the wonder of this moment.

Our daughters have a history laced with loss. They came to our family embodying their history as well as the losses of their family, culture and village life where it sounds like they enjoyed immense freedom and authority over their days. Their bodies communicated pieces of their story. For us, these bits were fragments with sharp edges which had likely helped them survive. Our survival tactics can also wound those who don’t mean harm.

He has mostly experienced a chill from her since she joined our family eight years ago. He’d worked so hard as that 10 year-old guy to win his sisters over. He’d been so excited for their arrival. He pursued. He invited. He coaxed. He was often met with the straight-arm, at other times a small fist.

Hello to our stories which weave themselves throughout our bodies.

There were days when their rejection birthed a rage within him he’d not known before. An anger birthed in the rumbling waters of being powerless to break through their brick-and-mortared hearts. As he offered me his anger, my questions eventually took him beneath the raging waters to the source of his pain and in a heap in my arms he’d cry out, “Why don’t they love me? I just want them to love me back.”

He’d never encountered another who didn’t love him. He was that kind of guy—amiable, playful, a lover.

Over the years, he surrendered to his inability to win her love. His surrender wasn’t always an acceptance of what is, but throughout seasons it was a pain-filled self-protection which can’t help but come with an edge. I’ve heard it said that the opposite of love isn’t anger, but indifference. As he held onto his anger, in a sense, he was holding onto love.

Several months ago, he was filled with a desire to pursue her once again. He surrendered his self-protected heart to love and extended invitations to her. A few months later he was greeted with, “Cole did you miss me?...I missed you.” His surrendered heart invited hers to open.

“Why didn’t you like me?” he asked her.

At first, she brushed off his question. But then, when we least expected it, she said, “I was blaming you for things that weren’t even your fault.” He didn’t pry. Her offering was more than enough.

Throughout our fourteen homeschool years, Brockman Academy had one devotion that we replayed daily. It was a desperate reading through 1 Corinthians 13 (MSG):

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

We confessed the areas in which we were struggling to love. And often, we confessed the areas in which others were struggling to love. Some days we prayed for ourselves, and on other days we prayed for each other. The ways we were each bent in breaking the Law of Love were clearly represented in our family tapestry. But, equally represented was a vision of love and an invitation to our God to re-shape us into the people He created us to be. I felt like a loser homeschool mom for many reasons. One of them was that I didn’t have the capacity or creativity to come up with another devotion than 1 Corinthians 13. Looking back, I see the grace in our one, simple devotion. After all, this is the vision of Jesus’s summation of the law—love God and love others.

Love never gives up. He said it a thousand times as we began our daily mantra of reciting 1 Corinthians 13. Eight and one-half years into his relationship with his sister, love kept fighting. And love is winning.

God is weaving a new thread of redemption into our family’s tapestry.

Is there someone in your life whom you struggle to love? Has self-protection forged an edge to your soul? Listen for God’s invitation to you. Is there a practice He’s inviting you into to mold you more into the lover He created you to be?