Day 52 - Falling in Love

2025 has been a year of two great celebrations for my husband and me: our Golden Wedding, and the 60th anniversary of my call to the ministry (Ahem, I was a mere teenager when it happened!).

We celebrated our Golden Wedding with a stay in a lovely hotel in the fascinating Cardiff Bay (formerly known as Tiger Bay, and full of history), and a meal out at an amazing restaurant. The picture shows us sitting outside the restaurant, in the warm June evening sunlight. And we celebrated my 60 years of vocation by going out for a meal locally – do you sense a pattern here?

I am constantly aware of the astonishing blessing of having two life-long loves. I am secure in the knowledge that Chris loves me, and, above and beyond that, that God loves me. But there is another and deeper blessing, and that is that I have had the opportunity to love them: the gift of loving Chris and of loving God, for a lifetime. Just that! It isn’t something to be proud of, not in the least. Our loves are human and flawed, but what an opportunity we are given, to love, to discover in ourselves such delight in another.

Through more than 50 years (we were engaged for three years), Chris and I have cared for each other, supported each other’s hopes and ambitions, and helped each other to flourish.

When it is lifelong, love matures and changes. We are not the same people that we were when we fell in love. We have been through a lot together, and it hasn’t always been easy. Some loves shatter under the pressure, and the pain is great. We know, in human terms, that the opportunity to love is finite. One day, we will know the devastation of grief and loss. But nothing can take away from the long years of shared experience, and joy in each other.

We will never not have loved.

For more than 60 years, I have loved and served God. It’s so good to be able to say that! Despite manifold failings, despite crushing disappointment, or regret for things we cannot undo, God offers the chance to return and rediscover that love. For sure, we change through a life of loving God, part of our growing ‘to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ’ (Ephesians 4:13). However long we love God, we will never know betrayal, or diminution in the love that surrounds us. And however long we love God, there is always more to be revealed. Love for God has the capacity to be boundless, and to hold in eternity all our human loving.

If you can, this Christmas time, spend some time giving thanks for the people you love, or have loved. It may be that this brings grief or regret as well as joy. Bring those sensations before God as well.

Then let all that fall away, and spend some time simply in God’s presence. Think of where your love for God has taken you through the years, where God has changed your life.

And give thanks!

Janet Wootton