The Way of Love Personified: How One Woman’s Life Proved We Are Bankrupt Without Love
I attended one of my sisterfriend’s grandmother’s funeral.
And perhaps what was most amazing? Something that was invisible—but so palpable—was love.
When it’s there, you see it, you feel it, you know it.
And when it is absent, you see it, you feel it, and you know it.
Now, without love, we are bankrupt, and bankruptcy is ever present in the lives of some—a love bankruptcy. And for some that also means financial bankruptcy, relational bankruptcy, emotional bankruptcy. But surely above all, to be bankrupt in love is to be bankrupt in the Spirit.
Better the Devil You Know? Why I Refuse to Stay Comfortable in Poverty
Some people who live in poverty do not want to get out of it. They want to remain in it, comfortable, because they know where they are.
Or, as some like to say, as the pesky, problematic idiom goes:
Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
I can’t imagine. I could never imagine. I would fight with the angels of light and the angels of darkness before I allowed myself—before I permitted my soul to sit with, to befriend, to be taken over by angels of darkness.
Have you felt love? Do you know her warm touch and her warm embrace? The nourishment you feel when it fills your belly? When she caresses your face? There is no love like pure love. There is no love like divine love.
I will spend the rest of my days fighting from bankruptcy into abundance. I will spend my days swimming in abundance. Lavishing in abundance. Energized by it. Fueled by it.
Not just for myself, but to share it with other people.
But this is not about that.
This is about tangible love, a love so full it warmed the room. Relatively few people in a huge sanctuary, but love herself filled the room. It was in the air. It permeated everyone and everything. It wafted through the air like the sweetest perfume.
It’s amazing what happens when you know love. When you didn’t know the person, but you know the sincerity, the authenticity, the integrity that people spoke about the deceased. You know love because you know people who knew her.
To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
2 Corinthians 5:8
And it’s beautiful, because love endures, and we felt it enduring in the room paying respects to not only the departed, but those who remain. A part of them gone in the physical but ever present, deeply felt in the spiritual.
That is love.
Love is care. It is deep listening. It moves. It shows up. Love is colorful. It was pinks and rose gold. It was purple and white and lavender, too.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—that is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And it is truly amazing to see—to know—that so many lives were made better because one person—Grandma Christine—choose love.
Love Never Dies: How Grandma Christine Personified 1 Corinthians 13
What stood out to me most about this funeral service?
Grandma Christine’s humanity. Or more accurately, her faith personified through her. These Bible verses came alive through her!:
It wasn’t the pleasantries and niceties and platitudes and pretense often afforded in one’s death. It was her family talking about her in the fullness of herself with great respect, admiration, and fondness. It was her children, and her children’s children, calling her blessed. I often say we were created in love, by love, for love, to love, and to be loved. And her service was love through and through.
And the loudest point of all that was not only spoken, but felt?: Her generosity of love.
She is clearly, this passage personified:
The Way of Love
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
1 Corinthians 13:1-8 & 13 MSG
If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
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.
Love never dies.
Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
From where I sat, her generosity of love became her loudest testimony and greatest legacy.
Even in her death, she restores hope with love. After all, love endures. What greater evidence of love is there than this?
A Prayer for Rest, Remembrance, and Enduring Love
May our loved ones rest in eternal, divine, heavenly peace. And may their love sustain and surprise us in ways we didn’t even know were possible.
And so it is. It is done, already. Amen.
