My mother had surgery last week and I’m in Tulsa caring for her. It’s been a reminder for me that love sticks around, it powers through the hard times, it lasts. And with my sole purpose here being to care for another, that fact couldn’t be more apparent.
Shakespeare, in Sonnet 116 says it this way:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Sure, that’s romantic love, but he makes the point - love sticks around. The Bible says much the same, from
1 Corinthians 13, 4-8, New International Version:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
So, the truth is, love… real love, sticks around. It washes bedpans and keeps up with medications and cleans up yack.