His Banner Over Me...

Is Love!" 
Song of Solomon 2:4

I grew up in one of the hottest "love" eras that ever pulsated and sweated its gyrating self onto the TV screen!  That's right - I am a child of the 50s when rock and roll was born and don't you know I was thrilled to twist and shout my little saddle-shoed self all around the dance floor.  If it wasn't the Twist, then maybe the Watusi, the Pony, the Stroll, the Mashed Potatoes...! For those of you who came on the scene long after American Bandstand and Dick Clark had exited center stage, you don't know what you missed! 

My star-struck teenage eyes witnessed the birth of rock and roll, the rise of Elvis Presley and The Beatles, and endless other pop stars who made their fortunes crooning to their young, naive audience about the fortunes of love. 

The Beatles famously advised us all that "All you need is love, love.  All you really need is love!" And of course, Elvis of the blue suede shoes and the scandalously gyrating hips, filled our impressionable, emerging awareness of things sexual and beyond, with the lyrics that made young girls swoon and faint at the very thought of the possibilities!

"Love me tender,
Love me true,
All my dreams fulfilled.
For my darlin I love you,
And I always will..."

While our parents had nightmares worrying about where this rock and roll stuff might lead their young offspring, the offspring themselves imagined themselves taking Elvis up on it and were more than willing to "fulfill all his dreams and love him tender, love him true"!  Could there be anything more to live for than love, love, love?  Love, we were quite sure, was "all we really need."  After all, the Beatles sang it.  It must be true"

 

It took a few years of life lived in the real world to discover that real love means a bit more than what we fantasized about!

 

Real love, we discovered, meant getting up every day to go to work to put food in the mouths of the babies that had been born out of the union of our love. 

 

Real love meant getting up in the middle of the night with a sick child with a temperature that scared us half to death. 

 

 Real love meant forgiving the one we had sworn to love til "death do us part" when we really wanted to help hasten that death along! 

 

Real love meant loving our partner when illness or old age ravished their good looks and left them hardly recognizable from the gorgeous hunk or beauty we had married in our youth. 

 

Real love takes its toll. 

Real love suffers. 


Real love cries.


Real love wants to run.


Real love stays.


Real love hangs on by the fingernails, when all else fails. 


Real love begs God for the strength to go on against

impossible odds.


Real love prays in the darkness to see the morning light.


Real love never, ever gives up on the object of its love.


Real love is unfathomable,

unexplainable,

unending,

so unlike anything we have ever known before. 



Real love teaches us who we are and who we want to be. 


Real love humbles us,

stretches us,

breaks us,

brings us to our knees...


Real love is the most difficult,

most heartbreaking,

most life-giving experience we have in this life.



Real love is the closest we will ever come to God

in this lifetime...