The Notebook.   We love it.  Ok, I love it, and luckily Steve used to love the Rockford Files and James Garner and his car….   so he is gracious and kind enough to watch it with me!   (For those of you under 50, you’ll have to look up The Rockford Files….)   The Notebook is one of the best films to ever grab your heart and awaken your soul to a radical love that never gives up, that lasts the long haul of life, and keeps believing against all odds.  Beautiful.   When the aging Noah sneaks into Allie’s room at the end of the movie, and the nurse turns a blind eye so they can be together, when he lays down in the bed next to her and she actually “comes back to him,” alert and recognizing him again, and they hold hands and drift off to ‘sleep’ believing their love is stronger than death …  there are no words.   We try to watch it once a year – on April 30 – because when it’s over, (and I am crying again), our hearts are back in a place of treasuring each other and realizing that every day we have together is such a gift.   That life goes so fast.  This realigning of our hearts is a gift.

It’s what happens when you are siting at a wedding and watching the faces of the young bride and groom and remembering.  And you hold her hand.    It’s what I see on my friends David & Andrea’s faces when they look at each other now that she has made it through her Leukemia battle and lives joyfully in remission.  It’s even what we felt when I had to go back for that second test because it might have been… ,  but we got the phone call and it was all clear… and that is the realigning that causes our hearts to cherish each other all over again.    It’s gratitude.   It’s awakening.   It’s awareness that life is a gift and marriage is a gift and the one you’re married to is the greatest of gifts God could have ever given you.

It’s like getting new eyes, like a new pair of glasses that brings into clarity that which you didn’t even realize had slipped into blurriness and dullness and completely void of the sharp colors of life.   NOW you can see!    You forgot what you were missing!   How beautiful!

This is how we see each other when our hearts are realigned and our sight is restored.    I look at this man I’ve been married to for 30 years and still see the boy I dated in high school.  I can still see him dressed in his gas station attendant uniform (a lovely orange and brown combo), showing up at my door with roses and the giant Bunny Rabbit which he aptly named Chase.   I remember the look on his face as I walked down the aisle toward him on April 30, 30 years ago.  I remember the bond of heaven that was sealed forever between us when we first held our baby boys in our arms and knew the wonder of something other-worldly that we did not deserve but that we were invited to partake in.

It’s gratitude.  It’s awakening.  It’s wonder.   It’s nothing less than God’s goodness and God’s love and only God can GIVE us this realignment of our hearts to truly FEEL and experience and know down in the depths of our souls what love really is. And how blessed we are.

It’s also a forgetting.  A wiping clean of all the hurts that came from the hard times and the harsh words and the moments of selfishness instead of gratitude.  In these moments of realigning, they seem to become strangely dim.  Unimportant.  Still a part of our past but now replaced with a new perspective on how small and insignificant when seen in the light of the greater picture and the brevity of life and the cherishing of each day.

It’s a remembering.  Of all that is good and true and all that first drew us to one another like a magnet so that we never wanted to be away from each other.  It’s a recalling to mind of the dreams we began with and the secrets we shared and the ways we saw the best in each other and believed in each other no matter what.  It’s a choosing to let it wash over us again and see that we are still the same, though a little older and a little battered and a lot wiser and whole lot sexier, as Steve will declare.

Oh, how we love each other when our hearts are aligned and our eyes can see!   Oh, how I long to live from this place every day,  to ABIDE and remain in this love, this love of Jesus – which He has poured out into my heart and now wants me to pour out on my SteveO.   How I have come to know and be fully convinced that this is how we will love all the time in heaven, like every moment of every day, we will be immersed in love and made perfect in love and know only love when we look at each other.    Oh, how I get it now when He told us to ask that His kingdom would come and His will would be done here – and now – as it is in heaven.   Here and now.

Today, right now, we ask you, Father:  realign our hearts to love each other with the pure love that we have tasted and seen and we know is true.  Keep us in this love for each other and help us to choose this realignment – to choose to cherish one another –  daily.    Thank you that when we abide in you, we abide and realign in your love, and then we can love and see our spouse in the truest and most eternal of ways.

“Beloved, let us (unselfishly) love and seek the best for one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God (through personal experience.)     1 John 4: 7  AMP

> Today’s blog is prompting a response.  What can you do today to realign your heart and see your spouse with the same eyes you saw them with when you first fell in love?  (This is possible, by the way, because the blood of Jesus cleanses us all from unrighteousness!) Maybe we start with thanking God for all the amazing things that are true of our spouse and making a list of all we are grateful for.  Ask Our good Father for this gift of a renewed heart and mind.  Maybe you want to write your love a letter and tell them all the beautiful things you love and cherish about them. Maybe they are sitting next to you right now, and you just hold their hand.   And maybe you check out Netflix, make some popcorn, and watch the Notebook together!    Whatever you do, may you be given the gift of cherishing today.