In middle school, a teacher once said something that never left me:


“You don’t fall in love. You grow in love with a person.”


At the time, I thought it was simply a whimsical way of saying I’ve fallen in love. Something that sounded a bit prettier, a bit more poetic. But I don’t think I truly understood what she meant until this past week.


I was editing through a wedding gallery when I suddenly stopped in my tracks. There was something about the crucifix that caught me in awe. It felt like I had caught a glimpse of the Lord again in a way I hadn’t in quite some time. Almost like that moment when you first catch a glimpse of your spouse or future spouse and realize, oh… I love this person.


And in that moment, my heart stirred, and I realized I had fallen in love with the Lord all over again. When reading that, you might assume that means I had fallen out of love with Him before. But that wouldn’t be true. The reality is that throughout our lives we fall in love over and over again and each time, we grow in love in a way we never knew before.


A friend once asked me at a wedding what my favorite part of the day was. As the hopeless romantic I am, I answered honestly, meaning every word.


The best part about a wedding day is that it is the day the bride and groom will love each other the least.


Not because they don’t love one another deeply, but because up until that moment it is the greatest love they believe they have given. Yet every day after will call them into something even greater.


In the quiet sacrifices.

In the daily self-denial.

In the small moments where they give their lives to one another again and again.

In those moments, they will grow in love.


They will fall in love over and over again with new versions of each other

from young to old,

from husband and wife to father and mother,

through seasons of joy and seasons of suffering.


And in each stage, they will learn the depths of the other’s soul and love them more than they thought possible before.


How beautiful it is that the Lord gifts us the vocation of marriage so that we may experience something of what our relationship with Him is meant to be. Because in growing to love my spouse, I have also grown to understand what it means to fall in love with the Lord again and again. So often I look back to when I first fell in love with the Lord and think, I wish I could love Him like that again. But how simple-minded of me not to realize that the love I have for the Lord today is far greater than the love I had then, a love that was once naive, a love that had not yet endured suffering.


So I pray that you, too, will grow in love with the Lord.

Because we do not simply fall in love. We grow in love, deeper and deeper each day.


So color or black & white?