Lawn Maintenance and Real Love

And she arose at midnight and took my son from beside me, while your servant slept, and laid him at her breast, and laid her dead son at my breast. 1 Kings 3:20

Early in our marriage, we moved into a neighborhood where most of the couples around us were in retirement, and all the guys spent a lot of time working on their immaculate lawns. My lawn looked like it was maintained by college kids in a rental. Previously, I hadn’t cared much about the condition of my lawn, but now, looking at my lawn adjacent to those pristine lawns, I was compelled to work on mine. Anyone watching me those first few summers would have assumed that lawn maintenance was important to me. If, however, you would have offered to sprinkle crab grass and weed seeds on all our lawns, making them all look equally terrible, I’d have been fine with that. I didn’t really care about my lawn. I just cared about how it made me feel to look at my scruffy lawn next to those spotless lawns. If you’d have explored my motives, you would have discovered what was and wasn’t important to me.

This was the wisdom which King Solomon displayed in today’s passage. In the story, two women came to him with a living infant and a dead infant. Living in the same house, both women delivered babies just a few days apart. One of the infants died in its sleep though, and the mother of the dead infant switched her child for the living one. The true mother of the living infant brought the case before King Solomon, who called for a sword to split the living child in two, giving half to both women. The false mother agreed, whereas the real mother surrendered her claim to the child. Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means put him to death (1 Kings 3:26). With this sacrificial act, King Solomon knew who the real mother was. The real mother would do anything for her child. The false mother didn’t love the child, but rather, in her grief, was just trying to make herself feel better.

Authentic love seeks the good of the beloved. Early on in my relationship with my wife, I had this intense emotional attachment that I called love. It was probably more akin to infatuation – I simply loved how she made me feel. This immature feeling is much like my love for donuts. I don’t really love donuts. Rather, I love how they make me feel. Authentic love, however, seeks the good of the other. As infatuation fades, for a marriage to last, true love needs to replace it. We don’t do it perfectly of course, but as we’ve grown and matured, I’d say that my wife and I have learned that if we love each other, we must purposefully meet each other’s needs, seeking the good of the other. A healthy marriage isn’t made by trying to get what I want out of it. Rather, a healthy marriage, marked by authentic love, is made by making sacrifices for the good of each other.