Love

I was working nursing the other evening and I walked into my patient Rory’s room to find his food tray untouched and him staring blankly at the wall.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked, offering him a cupful of pills.
His face suddenly began to crumble.
“How can you eat,” he asked, “when the person you love most in the world is dying?”
I noticed the balled-up tissues in his lap and suddenly I remembered reading in the nursing notes that his wife was dying in another hospital and he’d been taken to see her that day.
“You have no idea,” he said to me, “How much I loved her.”
And he began to sob. I knelt down on the floor and reached for his hand. I tried to think of something comforting to say but there was nothing and I just watched the tears pour down his face and stroked his hand.
“She is so beautiful.” He said between tears, “and I loved her so much”…
He couldn’t get many words out past that. I felt my eyes begin to fill up too and I just sat there for a long time and cried with him.
Later in the nursing station I mentioned him to one of the other nurses.
“He had thought his wife was having an affair with someone”, the nurse told me, “but then she was dying and he realized he didn’t care about anything anymore, he just loved her so much.”
I sat during my break and thought about Rory for the longest time. He was at the end of his life, and so was his wife, and the only thing that mattered to him was that he was losing the most precious thing in the world, which was her. There was nothing said in that room about his career, about his years in the military, about the fortune and fame he’d made. In the end all that remained was the person he loved.
I’ve been reading in Colossians about how a church should act. Clothe yourselves, Paul says, with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
There is something so soft and tender about those verses. Don’t clothe yourself with success, with assertiveness, with good looks and fancy clothes and lots of money, with an illustrious career, with other people’s praises. Those things may all come by themselves. But God doesn’t look on the outside, he looks at the heart, and he looks at the way we love each other deep down inside. At the end of your life that’s all that will remain.
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….. these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.