This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” —John 15:12-13 (NKJV)
At a stoplight one morning, I burst into tears, thinking about my brother who will soon be dead from cancer, which no one says but everyone is thinking, and I get honked at by a huge angry guy in a car the size of a toaster, which makes me laugh while crying.
The rest of the day I think how thankful I am for fifty years of this brother, years of fistfights and basketball and stealing shirts from each other and mud and laughter and surfing and postcards and first terrible little goat beards and banging shoulders in the kitchen with our other brothers and picking on our mom as she piped imprecations, and silly gifts and awkward conversations and unbelievably deep conversations, and digging cars out of the snow, and taking each other for granted until we didn’t, and awkwardly holding hands while praying at funerals, and bobbing each other’s kids on our knees, and a thousand thousand other things.
He stood up recently, tall and gaunt and fragile and illuminated, at our family reunion, and he said quietly that he loved us with a deep and inarticulate love, and that he was who he was because of us, and nothing in life ever made him so happy or so proud as to be milling around jostling with all of us, nothing, and if he had never been very good at saying that to us, he was sorry, but he felt that way most powerfully and deeply, and this was the time to say it, wasn’t it? Which it certainly was. Which it certainly is. And all day I have thought this: Why do we not tell each other every hour that we love each other? Why is that? Because we should. Maybe right now, right after this sentence ends.
Dear Lord, You have graced and blessed and inundated us with more gifts and glories than we can ever count, but the greatest of these is those we love. Thank You.
