The Cover of Love

What seems an eternity ago now, while I was preaching in California and both teaching and leading seminars on marriage, two very important truths I shared were: 1) You  have to put up with temporary moments of insanity in order to have a lasting marriage, and 2) You have to develop the ability to be more forgetful when it comes to wrongs.

That second truth, by the way, is what allows one to actually carry out the first.  If we cannot forget slights and offenses of our mate, we will never be able to truly love them as God's Word instructs.  The Lord tells us, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins" (1 Pet 4:8).

True, lasting, biblical love covers over offenses.  It is as if we took the offense, dug a grave, tossed it in and covered it over, laying it to rest.  We must bury the offense, placing a R.I.P. headstone over it before we can rest in peace and allow peace to permeate our relationship.

As long as we keep remembering the offense against our partner, we will never be able to hold them in the esteem that love demands.  Each time you lift up the offense in your memory, you lower your partner's value in your heart, placing a negative in your love bank.  If you do that enough times, your love bank will be overdrawn and your relationship will become bankrupt.

When someone says, "I can forgive but I can never forget what he/she did," they are equally saying, "I can love but I can never be in love with him/her."  We can, and should, love our enemies but we do not like them nor would we want to live with them.  We certainly do not have a deep, warm feeling about them.  To love is a choice to seek the greatest good of another but to be in love is an active pursuit of the other - something not really possible while remembering that which puts distance between you.

I'm not suggesting that it's easy.  If it were easy, six out of ten marriages wouldn't be ending in divorce.  Getting over offenses is a challenge.  Getting along for a lifetime is not a given, it is a giving - a giving up, a giving over, a giving in, a giving of self.  It is in this total giving of self that the wellspring of love is found.  And, this giving will not happen if we do not allow the cover of love to obscure the offense, for love "is not self- seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs" (1 Cor 13:5).  Jus' Say'n.