Twitter failed me not this morning. I was trying to find an illustration of why I was reluctant to post this passage, for we conflate love with romance. But love is more than that. Love is putting others before yourself. It is getting up and going to work. It is lighting the fire. It is making breakfast. It is caring for the ill. It is not romanice and soulmates.
It is not as much about romance and soulmates as doing our duty. We love because CHrist loved us. And this love is not exclusive, it is not the stuff of novels, and it does not make the papers, as this tragedy did.
Despite there being tragedies, there are no soulmates.
A mother of three battling aggressive lung cancer married her soulmate – and died two hours later. Tracy Glover, 42, tied the knot with John McKeowen in front of 100 family members and friends at their Thames home on Saturday.
Mr McKeowen said it was an emotional day. One minute they were celebrating the wedding and the next they were mourning the death of his wife.
But the new husband was grateful he found his soulmate because, he said, some people waited a lifetime to meet their one special person. “We were absolute soulmates. Two crazy peas in a far-out pod.”
Ms Glover had been bedridden for almost a month and in the last week could not even eat or drink, so he had been uncertain whether she would make it to her wedding.
“She could have passed two hours before, you know, and that would have been OK. I love her and I’d acted as a husband anyway and she had acted as my wife so it is just a bit of paper at the end of it, which is meaningful, of course. But it was awesome how it worked, but two hours later it was like ‘phwoa’ and everyone was shell-shocked.”
The same bagpipes that played at the wedding were used to perform the hymn Amazing Grace. Some guests did a haka and said a karakia.
The couple, who had been together five years, had spoken about getting married but became pre- occupied with the arrival of their baby boy, Keenan, in August.
Then Ms Glover was diagnosed with aggressive, incurable lung cancer, which had spread to her hip, shoulder and liver in November.
Mr McKeowen did marry his beloved. Good on him. But it is not merely a piece of paper. he should have done it earlier. For his grief will now be deep. And we should pray for him, and the children. However, in this you see the folk spirituality of New Zealand: the idea of the soulmate from teh Oprah and the ritual prayers in a dying languages conflated with Amazing Grace.
Because it matters not about the facts, just the paper. Not.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
(1 John 4:7-21 ESV)
What we have in Christ is not fear but duty. We love because he loved us, and we do his well because it needs to be done. There is but us where we are. It is not virtue signalling: it is real. Part of this is simple honouring of the tasks we have. The Cobbler works for the glory of God, as does the mother, and the surgeon, and the man who picks up the trash from the street.
We do not need to run according to the agenda of this age. It matters not a whit if we are single, divorced and discarded. it matters not a whit to God that we have erred. By his standards we all have: the very fact that we fear and have anxiety indicates that our love is not perfect.
But neither is this world. The current micromanagement of families, pulling children, for instance, should make us fear. For even if we are righteous, the world does hate us. And foster placements damage children: the current system is such that (according to one of my colleagues) the average kiwi foster child has had eight placements by the time he is eight.
And when I mutter that adopting such children as a policy would be better for them it is not heard, because the idea of bonding and the maternal imperative trumps all other things. But that was not so. Many women, including my mother, were in o fit place to raise a child and gave them up for adoption. Which, despite the ideologists, went fairly well, casuing less damage than our current family courts do.
If we stand for Christ and do our duty to each other that will suffice. We do not need to become corrupt. We do not need to seek the approval of the elite. And if we can get people to reform, and wed, and be faithful more that two hours out of death perhaps there will be less divorce lawyers and more peace in this world.
And let us preach the Gospel. Let us pray that our beloved will be fervent in the faith, and reinforce us living rightly. For our time of witness in this world is limited, and our time in front of Christ will be long.