TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2022 - WHAT IS LOVE - PART II

 TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2022 - WHAT IS LOVE - PART II

(And, the 71st birthday of my ex-wife.  Happy Birthday Dear!!!)

As we approach Valentine’s Day next Monday, I am writing about love and memories.  I left yesterday remembering my college days and reflecting on dating and love. Today this will continue in that vein.’

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JUNIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE

First, I must take a tangent.  I grew up in a conservative Christian home.  I had heard the concept of “don’t be unequally yoked”.  2 Corinthians 6:14 says “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness?”

I was in a fairy tale world where “all” were Christians.  After all, people were like me, and I was like them - right?  (Well, maybe not).  To me, (through my upbringing at home), being unequally yoked was like (gasp) dating and marrying a Catholic.  We might be Christians, but there were so many incongruities!! 

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At the midpoint of the spring semester of my junior year “I fell in love” - head over heels!!  Struck by Cupid’s arrow.

But, this lovely lady was (gasp again) Catholic and attended the College of Saint Teresa - the local women’s only Catholic college in Winona Minnesota.  But, that spring was magical.  I had a car and she didn’t. We were almost inseparable.  The campuses were maybe two miles apart. The night I met her, I walked her home, and I “floated” back to my campus!!

(Okay, true confessions again.  Once we were parking along the bluffs and really making out, and a cop knocked on my (foggy) window and told us to move along!!!)

She lived where she could take a train home for the summer, and I remember being on an overpass watching the train leave.

That summer, although separated, we wrote letters almost daily.  And, I spent one weekend with her and her family at the cabin on the Mississippi River.  (And, I knew that it just wouldn’t work for me to bring her to my house and family.  Gasp - a Catholic girlfriend in my house!!! Wow - was I indoctrinated!!).  It was a great time to be at their cabin - with one exception.  Canoeing on the Mississippi River without enough sunscreen results in sunburn!!!  But, I was young and in love so what is a sunburn when my heart was already on fire!!!

Senior year was so perfect - dates, making out, (note - as a conservative Catholic and a conservative Protestant, this still was ‘chaste’).  We ended our senior years going in different directions.  She had prepared herself for a career and I had enjoyed college.

She had a great entry-level job with 3M in St. Paul Minnesota, and I had an entry-level job teaching at one of the smallest school districts in Wisconsin. Talking about unequally yoked.  She was going places and I wasn’t.  

We met up at the Lacrosse Wisconsin Oktoberfest.  (I will leave the details out - other than to say it was awesome - even when she lost her purse at the Lacrosse landfill - where we were making out - and miraculously it was found and returned).  

In what I now call a very stupid move, I broke the relationship off. She was on the road to success and I was on the road to Belmont Wisconsin in a yellow school bus with the JV basketball team.  (Yes, I was a ‘“momma's boy” and this wasn’t going to work out from both a success story and a religious view.).

(We are still friends today.  I will be sending this story to her.  She has been married almost 50 years to a great husband (much better than I would have been!!!).

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So, what is love?  

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I taught two years in that (wonderful) rural Wisconsin school - where I learned a lot about teaching.  And, at age 25 I went back to get my master’s degree.  If I was going to be a teacher, I needed a master’s degree to get better pay.

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I was the “Resident Director” and in charge of a co-ed dormitory, and a graduate assistant in the Mathematics Department.  And, I was on the prowl for a girlfriend.  My biological clock was ticking (so I thought).  At age 25, I was getting my master's degree and it was going to be time to settle down.  From Carly Simon’s song “That’s the way I always heard it to be”:

But you say it's time we moved in together

And raised a family of our own, you and me

Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be

You want to marry me, we'll marry

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(But, God had a lot left for me!!!  As I approach my 75th birthday this year, it seems like being 25, young and single was a different lifetime - and it was!!)

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I started this yesterday looking at the concept of LOVE as we move toward Valentine’s Day.  

It has taken a lifetime to get to agape love - to the concept of “LOVE WINS”.  I am to LOVE everybody as my brother and sister.  

So, yes, Pollyanna Karen does say and does mean that LOVE WINS!!!  The real Godly agape love!!

Karen

February 8, 2022