On a whim…

1 Corinthians 13:8 NRSV

“Love never ends.”

There is a photograph.

Four girls in Easter dresses. Three little ones and an older sister. Bonnets. White gloves. Small purses. Careful posture. They are cute.

That is what I saw when Rosanne first shared it with me in 2006.

Recently I looked again. And this time I saw her face.

It is the face I knew through most of the days we had together. Not presented. Not performed. Simply there. The face of a young teenager—she is perhaps thirteen—and it is already, unmistakably, the face I loved.

That broke me. Because she is gone.

Easter does not give her back to me.

But then I looked a third time.

And I saw something else. Not grief. Not even love, exactly. I saw intent.

The baby in her lap. The sisters around her. Her parents beyond the frame.

The question she is already answering without being asked:

How shall I care for them.

Not how. Simply that she will. And nothing will deflect her.

That is who she was. I have written three books trying to say it. And here it is in the face of a thirteen year old girl in an Easter dress.

Love never ends.

Not because I can prove it.

Because I have seen what love looks like

when it has fully decided what it is for.

Prayer

God, when I cannot resolve what I have lost, keep me from believing that what was given in love has been lost with it.