Mountaintop Revival

Mountain Top Revival
or Why I Love Renee
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A love letter is an intense, personal affair. It consumes your mind and frustrates your vocabulary as you attempt to distill the most ancient and potent feelings into words. It's a personal communication, from one to his beloved, not to be seen or shared beyond the secret world that exists within true love. It's poetic, terse, sappy, slightly gay, allusive, obtuse, opaque, obsequious and clairvoyant, and most certainly not funny. I assure you, this is not a love letter (although it did have its knees removed).

Its rather futile to try and define love among people without common values. The Bible says that a man who would lay down his life for his friend shows perhaps the greatest love. I have intense respect and gratitude for the soldier who faces this greatest sacrifice, and pray that it may never be needed. A mother's love cannot be equaled, and those who deliver this selfless love deserve honor and loyalty, as does my own mother for the love she's shown myself and my siblings. But the love between a man and wife is a different thing altogether. The Book says a man should leave his family, and become one with his beloved. That he should lead her, guide her, protect her, present her faultless to The Almighty on the day of judgment, redeemed and saved and walking together in the light of truth. But which is love? Is it the cause, or the effect? Do I do these things because I love her? Or do I love her because God has led me to do these things?

This, I think, is what Peter called the “profound mystery” of the love between man and wife, of Christ and the church. Does Christ love us – His church – because he sacrificed so much, or was his sacrifice the result of his love for us? And, I know, at this point I have lost most of my readers. For the 3 of you who are left, I'll bring it back down to earth. The “profound mystery” that I see is the fact that love itself is a decision, not an emotion. Yet love shows itself in some of the most powerful, intense emotions, and just as much in the most fleeting, and barely noticeable ones.

My father, as he is wont to do, recently challenged whether my love for Renee was true. He had witnessed an early morning scrimmage between her and I over what the afternoon plans would be. I tought nothing of it at the time, but it was enough to plant the seed of doubt in my father's mind that I, a fiercely independent soul, was again being bossed around by my “better” half. I learned two things: one, you don't air out your dirty laundry no matter how minor you both might consider it to be; and two, that dear ol' dad was right. If we had ended up going antiquing or yard-sale-ing or shoe shopping or whatever-the-heck-else she had wanted to do that day, I would have resented her for it. And that seed if disdain would have grown larger and larger, and my will weaker and weaker, as we trudged forward in our one-sided relationship. But that didn't happen. She understood that we had different things to do that day, and we went our separate ways for the afternoon and met up again after church, refreshed and even more in love than when we had parted.

My Sweat Pea spent a lot of her childhood in Vermont, beyond the hilly Green Mountain Range, in country so beautiful and American it makes you want to stand up and salute The Revolution. Her mother still lives out there, on the family property, and we visit her often. From here in upstate, the two-lane road winds through hills and valleys, between snow-capped mountains, skids over creeks and flies flat over reservoirs toward the sleepy little town of our destination. About 20 minutes before we arrive, we pass over the highest point of the trip, Hogback Mountain Lookout. Every time we pass it, Renee comments on the restaurant there, and how they used to have the best breakfast around. The restaurant is closed now, a victim of hard economic times, its expansive deck staring silently into the expanse that lies before it. This particular time, we round the sloping left-hand curve that bends around the entrance to the abandoned eatery, and I think to myself how much of a shame it is that the restaurant is gone, even though I've never been there. It needs a reopening, a revival. At that moment, almost as if she had been reading my thoughts, my Sweetie turns to me and says, “I'm so glad I'm with you.”

My friends, I am in love.