She’s a faded memory now, the recent high school grad in spectacles and seersucker, standing at the edge of Rome’s massive Trevi Fountain. Me. Tossing a coin over my shoulder. Spinning to see where it landed.
I can’t remember what, or even if, I wished anything, all those decades ago. For health? For love? For a return to Rome? A safe flight home to Vancouver? I really don’t recall. But if I wished for love (as do millions of others whose coins are fished from the fountain every few weeks) that wish has been granted.
I am a blessed woman—but not by Oceanus, the pagan god that inspired the Trevi Fountain in 1762. No, my blessings flow from the hand of Yahweh, eternal God and Father of all mankind. And they have been many.
Five years after that day in Rome, now married to the Preacher and expecting our first child, I crafted Valentine cards for our birth families. Simple cards. I didn’t have the tools available today. A gold paper doily on red construction paper. Roses cut from a magazine. A tiny heart punch and a white pencil crayon.
“There are too many things that need to be said more often,” I’d printed. “One of them is so important there is a special day set aside to remind us to say it. We could not let today go by and not tell you…WE LOVE YOU. Rick and Kathy.”
Decades passed. My parents passed. Years later, while sorting through some of my mother’s saved papers, I found that card. Saved. Still pristine. And her voice still echoes, “I love you too, Kathleen.”
The Preacher and I will mark five decades of marriage later this year. Our union has produced two children and six grandchildren. The love that has followed our family, the life we’ve lived, has included quiet seas and rough. I’m grateful I couldn’t see any of that when I romanticized beside that magnificent Roman fountain.
In the Trevi, statues of Tritons guide Oceanus’ shell chariot, illustrating the theme ‘taming the troubled waters.’ But over the years, I have seen a different hand steering our family boat. Sometimes Jesus has calmed our troubled waters. But sometimes he has let the storm rage, holding us steady until it passed.
February has a reputation as the month we celebrate love, primarily romantic love, in highly commerical ways. Allow me to broaden that here. Find some quiet moments. Put down your devices. Thank God for the loves in your life, for His love that has followed you. Saved you. Kept you. Then pick up that device and call someone you love. Several someones. Say those words. “I. Love. You.” We are never guaranteed another opportunity to speak to them.
P.S. For a complete and perfect definition of love, how to identify it, how to practice it, read 1 Corinthians 13 in God’s book.
My birth family provided my first demonstration of genuine love. Yes, that’s me in the front with the beat-up knees. My closest sister and I (far right) played outside a LOT. Great memories!