An Embarrassment of Love

I am embarrassed by my husband’s love for me. Not in the “No, no, stop…” way, but in the way we say about those who are wealthy with “an embarrassment of riches.” This morning I sent a text to a dear one saying, “Happy Birthday!” and she replied, “I’m blessed for sure!” That kind of embarrassment because it just seems so overwhelming, too good to be true.

This morning while my English muffin toasts I read an email my husband sent to me two hours before I woke. He likes to wake while it is still dark, drink his coffee while the moon still shines, and listen to the neighborhood before it is all truck horns and pool vacuums and the dog from next door begins the day’s regime of barking. He likes to wake and sit in the same place every morning, directly across from our back door, which he leaves open to let the air in. He makes coffee or tea or, lately, Hot Toddies sans alcohol. He sends texts to friends saying he’s praying for them or a poem he read or a verse that made him think of them. He begins it with the poet, “in happiness, in kindness.” He works through the stack of books beside him: his Bible, our Advent guide, a book of poems, his journal, his poetry notebook, and, currently, Andrew Peterson’s new book. After this is when he sends me the email.

“Good morning, beautiful wife,” he writes and this is where my embarrassment begins because beauty is not an attribute I believe to be true of me.

Then he writes about the darkness and weight of Advent, but also the darkness and weight of being in the world and the ways it hurts and heals us. I think to myself: how did I marry one who never tries to own or fix or rule over me, but simply walks beside me with love. He doesn’t pretend there aren’t hard things in us and around us, but neither does he stop there.

He writes of his time with the Lord, the words he heard in contemplation, the words he prayed in supplication. He is a man who loves God and not in one of those showy, nuggety, out to prove he’s the most theological in the room, but in a way that is so disarmingly humble and gentle and unshowy, that it sometimes frustrates me because I think he is 10,000 feet tall and he acts like he is only three feet. He treats everyone else as though they’re the giants, as though their words are the only words in the world right when they’re being spoken. Right after a friend saw the new Mister Rogers movie, he messaged Nate and said, in about the most accurate representation of my husband I have ever heard, “I kept thinking, ‘He reminds me of Nate.’” And he said it because it’s true.

Next, he shares a poem with me because we are both people of words and yet people of brevity, too, and poetry warm us all the way through.

Last, he lists all the ways and reasons he loves me with one word each, filling up my lungs with the air of affirmation and breath of belief.

He loves me.

He loves me.

He loves me.

This is what I mean by an embarrassment of riches. I am so self-conscious of his love for me that not only do I not want to tell you about it, I hardly believe it for myself. I spend most of my energy dis-believing most of what he says to me. “I want you to talk more,” “I want to hear all about your day,” “I do believe you’re beautiful,” “Tell me what you think about this,” “What are your thoughts about that?” “I just want to listen to you,” “I just like being with you.” Nate is the person in my life most like the Lord and I would say that even if I wasn’t married to him. Before we knew one another, people would say that about him and I thought, surely, it’s too good to be true. But it isn’t.

I am embarrassed to be loved so deeply, so well, so thoroughly, so fully, and so spiritually. And ultimately, it is because I struggle to believe that God loves me far more particularly than does my husband. And I’m embarrassed because I think: I want everyone to have this and those who don’t or can’t or won’t, I don’t want them to know it’s possible because what if that makes them mistrust God?

But I was messaging with a friend this morning about congruency, being integrated and fully aligned with our selves all the way through, about not lying to others or to ourselves about who or what or where we are spiritually. How it is only through honesty that we can both receive healing and become whole. As long as there is disparity between what we say and what we feel at our core, we will feel that inner-niggling sense of something being untrue. This is what I mean about being embarrassed by my husband’s love. I know it is true with my head, perhaps even my heart, but somewhere in there, that small sense of doubt seems larger than all of the rest. “Me? You love me? I’m a mess. And like, not one of those cutesy messes, but like, I mean, you know me, I leave my clothes on the floor and stay up too late reading and my sadness comes out sideways and my anger comes out in great bursts of frustration and I go a whole week without shaving my legs and you have to force me to leave the house sometimes and when was the last time we laughed, really laughed?”

Today a friend and I recorded an episode for her upcoming podcast and we talked about how it isn’t until we’re fully known, fully seen, fully revealed, that we can know true healing, true wholeness. And not just with God but with humans too. God was the first one to say it wasn’t good for man to be alone; that wasn’t man’s idea, it was God’s. God said, “I’m going to make a helper fit for him.” And yes, yes, we know that’s about marriage but I think it’s about so much more. I think it’s about the communal need for humans, embodied people, for love from one human to another. To say, like Lewis said, “You too? Me too.”

What embarrasses me about my husband’s love for me is that he sees me and he loves me. That’s it. He sees me—all of me. And he loves me. It is one thing to be seen and then repulse those who saw. It is another thing to be loved but not truly seen. Neither one is true though, true seeing or true love. Neither one is congruent or whole. To be seen is to be loved. And to be loved is to be seen.

And this is how God loves us. That’s what I’m trying to get at and perhaps getting to badly, but what I’m trying to say is that there is an embarrassment of riches in the way God loves us because it is the most true kind of love only because it is the most seen kind of love. And to prove his love for us, he puts mere men and women in our lives who see and love too.

I have always believed that I am unloveable, my whole life. But somewhere in there, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy because I began to act as though I wasn’t lovable and wouldn’t let people love me, not truly, not deeply—and by that I mean I wouldn’t let people see me, not the whole me. Being married to Nate isn’t like being married to God, but also, it kind of is. I can’t hide the knobs and niggles and doubts and depressions and fears and fights and all the things I wish weren’t true of me. And because I can’t, I’m able to be loved for real, for whole.

What I’m trying to say is where we feel unloved, is it possible, maybe, perhaps, it is because we hide ourselves from others, sure that if they saw, they’d surely deny us the one thing we want most? And yet, to have courage, to show up, to bring our wounds and our hurts and our most vulnerable spaces to another person and offer it to them as an act of love, could this be where God reveals his own love to us too? I think so. I think so.