Fearless Love

Excellent or Praiseworthy is posted on Monday and Thursday nights.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear… – 1 John 4:18a

Love is the answer to fixing all relationship issues, at least that’s what we are told by everyone. Hollywood certainly suggests that if a man and women fall in love, everything will be great until they fall out of love. Then they just need to find another person to fall in love with and it will all be good again.

Hollywood is wrong. That doesn’t mean that love isn’t the answer to all our relationship issues, but Hollywood confuses romance with love. The result is that a lot of people start to think that love equals a constant state of romance.

It is hard to imagine anything more exhausting than a constant state of romance. We need romance, for sure, but in bursts. Men, generally lacking the emotional wiring that women are blessed with, especially find the idea of constant romance an impossible challenge. It’s not that men can’t be romantic, but it takes a lot of energy. So men can’t be romantic all of the time. Even women will eventually run out of romantic energy–we just don’t see that as often as they tend to always outlast men. In the military, while not impossible during a deployment, romance is much trickier. So does that mean there is less love? Of course not.

So if constant romance is not love, and loving each other is critical to maintaining a healthy relationship, what do we have to do? This question plagued me for a long time. I knew that I needed to love and be loved, and I kind of knew when I felt loved. But the problem was that I wasn’t always sure what to do to love. Call me a simple soldier, but a manual would have been nice. Something with a plain-speaking, practical guide telling me what to do to love my wife. Otherwise, the concept of love just seemed too overwhelming, too fluffy and, quite frankly, unmilitary. Then I read 1 John 4:18 and saw something I hadn’t seen before…

Some of you will have known this a long time ago. So this revelation is for others like me who are a bit slower on the uptake… Perfect love casts out all fear. Now we can’t love perfectly, only God is capable of doing that. But we can work toward His standard. John is saying in this verse that there is a converse relationship between love and fear. So while love seems a little intangible, I know what fear is. That’s something we get to deal with in life and especially in military life.

So, if I want to love my wife more, I need to work on taking away any fear that she might have. When women are asked what they are afraid of, a common theme is abandonment–physical or emotional. This can be why some wives hate deployments. They fear the insecurity that comes from being left alone. That leads me to the practical things I can do for my wife – physically hold her hand to show I am right there with her, hug her often so she feels my support, tell her how much I appreciate her at least daily, boast about her to others, find out what she likes and do that or get that for her. The list goes on. If I communicate well when I am away then I can maintain the emotional security she needs, but the physical security is obviously a little trickier. If I prepare everything well – finances, insurance, house and car maintenance, etc., she will feel some physical security even when I’m gone. If I make it a habit to physically reassure her when I am home, the effect will extend to when I am away because she knows that if I was home, I would be holding her as often as she needs. The point is that whether I’m home or away, whenever I do something that makes her feel more secure and less anxious or fearful in our relationship, I am loving her. Sometimes that means a little romance, but not constantly…

Men generally fear failure. We fear being laughed at or looked down upon as being weak or incompetent. So wives, if you want your husbands to feel more loved, one of the most practical things you can do is to compliment them. Tell them you are proud of them and feel safe around them–that they are doing a great job. We know we’re not perfect, but focus on the bits we are great at and it will make us want to be great in the other areas too. Because we love it when our wives take away our fear of failure. And if you are separated because either you or your husband are deployed, write those compliments down for your man and it will sustain him for a long time.

Perfect love casts out all fear, so let’s take away each others’ fears and see what happens!

Questions:
1. What would be your fears in your relationship, great or small (including sharing your fears if that is one of them)? Share them with your spouse.
2. What surprised you about your spouse’s fears?
3. What practical steps can you make to help your spouse feel more secure? Group them into daily, weekly, monthly and on occasion. Make an action plan. Follow the plan.