If you decide that you are going to love someone (and I do believe that love is a decision, a choice) than you have just signed yourself up for some pain and heartbreak, too. I just finished (after 2+ years) a book my mother-in-love Annette gave me for a graduation gift-- Covenant Hearts by Bruce C. Hafen. It's been so long since I started that I feel like I need to reread it.
This is not just a book for people who are married. This is a book for anyone who has or will love someone else, and not just romantically. A beehive girl in our ward shared that her favorite line in one of the sacrament hymns says that the Savior "saved our world by love"; she compared this to how other people typically talk about saving the world.
SO, love. More than the song "L is for the way you look at me". . . Not the trite but the true. Not the spontaneous but the enduring. Brother Hafen says in the last chapter of his book:
"Even when love wounds us, that is because love matters so much. The deep hurt is the mirror image of the deep joy that awaits us. The ache we feel wouldn't be so bad if it didn't come from something so good" (p. 263).
I learned about love from my family. I can honestly say that my family loves each other in deep, maddening ways. Sometimes, if you were to walk through the door, you might wonder if these individuals do love each other by the way they interact. I think about the pain and I think about the joy--the flip side of the same token. It hurts because it means so much. I love my family. I know they love me and they love the Lord. And I know, in the end, all families will be saved by love, by sacrifices in the similitude of the loving sacrifice made by the One who first loved us.
