Love Starts at Home

by Sarah Reinhard | November 9, 2015 12:04 am

[1]Yes, love starts at home.

Easy for me to say, I know.  I’m far more excited to take a hot meal to the stranger from church who just had a baby than I am to serve it to my own clan.  I’m hot with tears over world disasters but strangely cold about the fighting between my own children.

The way I’ve been working on changing this attitude is through a discipline that’s alarmingly old-fashioned.  It reminds me of my grandma’s generation and might well make you roll your eyes.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

It started when I figured out how much my husband was spending on eating out at lunch, not to mention the unhealthiness of all those cheeseburgers.  Though I knew I’d never get him to eat salads even if I packed them for him, I figured we could, at the very least, save some money packing his lunch.

The problem was that I would have to be the one to pack his lunch.

It’s not just that he’s not a morning person.  It’s not just that he needs as much sleep as he can get.  It’s not just that I’m already up and about and able to remember these things before the sun rises.

It’s that I love him.

Those three minutes I spend most mornings assembling his lunch connect me to his work world in a small way.  They insert my love for him and my appreciation for his commitment despite long and grueling days into the heart of his day.  Sometimes I slip a note in, reminiscent of our courtship, when I’d write him a daily note and leave it for him at work.  Other times, I slip in an extra cupcake or something special.

He doesn’t often tell me thank you with words, and when I forget or neglect to pack his lunch, he’s never recriminating.

I know he appreciates it, though.  I can tell by the way he carefully puts the fork or spoon back in, wrapped in a napkin.  I know from the fact that he always returns the lunchbox to me after work.

It’s something so small, packing my husband’s lunch.  It’s not as much work as the Clean Floor Pickup the kids and I try to do before he gets home, but it is a reminder, ever morning, of how hard we work for this domestic church of ours.  The work is sometimes mundane and unremarkable, but it’s taking us ever closer to our goal: heaven.

Source URL: https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2015/11/reinhard-love-starts-at-home/

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