*I am very humbled and honored to have the Huffington Post publish this piece, you can find it here. Please spread the love by sharing this post or anything that speaks to your heart with your friends and family as my purpose is to spread love any way that I know how*
When my family moved back to the United States when I was
about 8 years old, one of the biggest culture shocks to me was how much
Americans said the phrase “I love you.”
It came when parents dropped their kids off to school, or as the
concluding phrase to a phone conversation, or just because, during a casual shopping
trip to the mall. In my
traditional and somewhat conservative Arabic family, you didn’t really say “I
love you.” Honestly, it was hard
enough wishing my parents or brothers a happy birthday, let alone actually telling
them that I loved them. I remember
one day after spending the afternoon with a friend whose mother always told her
she loved her for no apparent reason at all, I asked my father why he never
said that to me. His reaction of
course was one that I had already anticipated. He said that he didn’t need to tell me that he loves me
because he shows me love every single day by having food in the refrigerator to
keep me full, giving me money to buy things that I need, and making sure that I
received a proper education, among many other things. He also added that if he said it to me all the time, it
would lose meaning and value.
I agree that there was certainly no shortage of all of the
ways that love was shown to me throughout my childhood and adolescence. My father gave up everything to bring
us to America to give us an opportunity for a better life, and if that’s not an
ultimate act of love then I don’t know what is. But why was there always that longing, tugging at my heart
strings…
I spent those years of my adolescence locked in my room, angry
and hopeful, reading about what love looked like, and felt like. Love felt cold sometimes, like when I
kept my teddy bears close to me to make sure they stayed warm. It felt like my heart swimming in my
chest when Anne finally professed and reciprocated her love to Gilbert on Anne
of Green Gables. It looked like a
puppet, as if there was a string somewhere under Mr. Rochester’s left rib,
tying him tightly to little plain Jane Eyre. I’ll never forget my best friend
from college, whose parents still held hands under the table as we ate our
supper at our favorite Mexican restaurant. This couldn’t just be something that you read about,
right? Most people told me that I would
live my life greatly disappointed, and for a long time, I was.
When I saw him, the gates to Heaven opened. I saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt
love all at the very same time.
Our serendipitous encounter that summer day was and still is an
incredibly spiritual experience for the both of us, and one that has had the
greatest impact on our faith. In
that instant, my entire life flashed before my eyes. If I sit here and write out to you all the details of that
day, those months, these years, you might not believe me because I truly know that
it is not of this earthly realm.
But please believe me when I tell you that life is much too short not to
tell the people that you love the most, “I love you.” I tell him every day, every night, and every time I think
it. I tell him in public, and in
private. When I rub his ears and
push his hair out of his eyes, and when he holds my hand under the dinner
table. I tell him when he’s having
a good day, or when I’m having a difficult day. I told him over and over when those pink lines on the
pregnancy test read positive. Love
is in our daughter’s name and even simply saying her name when she wakes up
from a nap makes my heart flutter. When he lays on the floor with her speaking baby
language, I tell them both how much I love them, and adore them. Goodness she looks so much like him, I
constantly find myself staring at them with tears in my eyes, living this and
experiencing this is so much more extraordinary than reading about it in a book
can ever be, but everything to hope for.
We are not perfect, and if we have ever felt frustrated at one another,
nothing is more powerful than “I’m sorry, I love you.” As much as we love taking risks, we
hold true to never going to bed angry because the possibility of never waking
up is much too great of a risk to take.
Forgiveness and love, these are the things that make up the core of our entire
existence. God Himself not only
showed us that He loves us, but also tells us multiple times. He tells us that He loves us. Those words have never ever lost value
to me, no matter how many times I say them, because I mean them with all of my
being and everything that I am. So
while some may think that I say I love you too much, I say that you can never
say it enough.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
*This post is also featured on The Love More Shop, committed to spreading love and giving back to parents in a simple way*
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
*This post is also featured on The Love More Shop, committed to spreading love and giving back to parents in a simple way*
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