When we hear the phrase “Falling in love”, most of us think of a romantic love, late night phone conversations, candle lit dinners, hand holding. These are normally the things that come to mind when we think of falling I love.
I recently started thinking about falling in love as a whole new concept, falling in love with your family members. It seems a lot of the time that our family members are not blood relatives but are actually chosen for us by someone else.
You don’t have any control over the family that you are born into, yet there is an automatic love there. Even when there is trouble, you are quick to forgive. We grow up hearing “No one will ever love you like your brother or sister.” “Blood is thicker than water.” “Always put your family first because in the end they are the only ones that will be there for you.”
What happens when most of your family isn’t related to you by blood? I know someone who absolutely adores her little brother. She’s constantly telling stories about the newest thing he has learned or said. After hearing one of her newest stories about him the other day, I realized that they are not related by blood at all. He is her brother in every sense of the word, just not by bloodline. She chooses to love him as if he were. At that moment I realized we do choose our family members. We choose them by choosing to love them.
Sometimes choosing to love a family member that was chosen for us is a choice we make every day. That’s where the “Falling in love” part comes in. I recently realized that I had fallen in love with some family members that had been chosen for me fifteen years earlier.
Unfortunately for me it took loss, and the fear of loss to realize how great this love really is. You see I lost my step-dad to a heart attack eleven months ago, and my step-mom is fighting for her life against cancer as I write this. I regret wasting all those years that I could have let the love grow deeper. Maybe sometimes it takes a jolt of reality, a little picture of just how fragile life can be, and the fact that there isn’t always tomorrow. For now I have whatever time God will give us with my step-mom and I hope that in that time I can be a better daughter and show her the real love that I have for her.
Falling in love can definitely be whimsical, sweet, romantic, but most of the time it is a choice. My hope is that you will stop and think about your choices today, and choose to fall in love with those that are already in your family. I am blessed to have and to have had the people in my life that I did not choose, but were chosen for me.
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