Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. ~I Corinthians 13:4-7

“Pick out some flowers,” he says as I wheel the cart in the doors at Fresh Market.

This is how we begin the gift together.  Our weekend at home sans children; a rarity in our twenty-one years of marriage.

As he begins to pick out food, I linger longer than seems necessary over the profuse buckets of beauty. Begin to feel like a child struggling to choose which dessert I want from one hundred choices that all look so delicious.

“Get them both,” he says from the fruit bin.

“Both of them,” I ask. “That feels a bit extravagant. Do I really need that many flowers?”

He walks back to me, takes both of the big bouquets of roses from my hands and lays them in the cart. Smiles over me.

And this is the way of love: extravagant, beyond what you deserve  or expect beauty that makes you want to be more, better, and give yourself away.

I want to tell you how knowing him has transformed me but I can’t find the words.  And when I attempt words, the eyes become like hard rain falling on windshield.  Can’t see beyond the emotion. 

Redemption calling out the best of me through the way this man lives life, loves me.  This is deep water. And maybe one day, He will give me the words to tell you about the love story that is mine. A story that tells how the words from the first book of Corinthians are possible and true.

Today, I will let the flowers speak what the heart struggles to say.

And wherever your weekend plans take you, may you sense and know how much God loves you.

Linking today with Scripture & a SnapshotPause on the Path, [I Love] Saturdays and Jumping Tandem.