Love is Being Inconvenienced

                  ^^My husband inconveniences all of us to get out into nature. We are better for it, and he is definitely the most inconvenienced.

It is 2:30 in the morning. My oldest daughter is at the side of my bed, and her nose is bleeding. My husband has been traveling for two days, and I went to bed late because I couldn’t sleep. But I get up, and help her back to bed with tissues.

Our youngest is five months old. We take a trip to Cape Cod to visit my husband’s best friend. On our way there, my husband throws his back out. They feed our kids and handled life while I nurse our baby and my husband nurses his back. I don’t even get to do the dishes.

My neighbor, Rose, has an aneurysm at the gym. The kind that are often fatal. While she is recuperating, her best friend and neighbor sends out daily updates and organizes a dinner meal chart so her family was covered. Rose battled through rehab and therapy, and now walks her dog and teaches yoga again.

My stoic father-in-law comes down every spring and plants us a garden. Even though he lives two hours away, has Parkinson’s and shows up everytime my kids have so much as a recital saying, ‘that’s my job’.

My mother and mother-in-law bring at least two dishes to every gathering.

Some people show up. Some people are just there. And the people they help remember. For a long, long time.

I recently discovered the writer Ann Voskamp (who I think most people discovered a million years ago – behind the times is my middle name). The post I read has just stayed with me.

A lot.

“You love as well as you are willing to be inconvenienced,” she wrote. She was referring to her friend who had just passed away from cancer, and how she demonstrated her own willingness to be inconvenienced in her life.

This truth challenged me. As a mother of young kids with a lot of demands on my time and money and emotions, it is sometimes so easy to think that just the daily toil is all I can handle. It is so easy to play victim in my head when anything is asked of me – “I’m spent, let someone else do it.” I am all for self-care and boundaries, and there are certainly times in life – having a newborn comes to mind – where things have to slack for you to focus on your tribe, to circle your wagons. And I am for mothers making sure they take care of themselves but I also know that motherhood can bring out a little bit of the OCD in the best of us.  We think that this late night for a family gathering or that birthday party at nap time might just be the end of us. But love is being inconvenienced.

I think that is why God made marriage. Because nothing is more inconvenient than sharing everything you have and giving everything you can to another person. But married or not, it seems to me that people fall into one of two camps in adulthood: those that are willing to be inconvenienced to support and help and love other people and those that are too busy. Too overwhelmed. Too consumed with their day to day to be able to catch a glimmer of the bigger picture.

As Ann Voskamp writes,

“There are one of two roads you can take through life: the Impressive Road or the Eulogy Road.

The Impressive Road is about impressing people, about creating your own parade of accomplishments, about trying to get people to step outside and applaud when you pass by.

And the Eulogy Road is about about letting the love of God and the needs of people impress and form and shape you, about being the Samaritan who sacrifices to help the other wounded paraders, about stepping inside to applaud the forgotten and about never passing anyone by. What drives us and this world, and drives us to drive our children, to build a successful life of laurels rather than focusing on building a meaningful life of love? All that show up at funerals are your friends and family — not all of your feats.

Funerals disrupt our lives. They come at inconvenient times and don’t take into account our other responsibilities. So do sickness, and celebration, and surprise. But maybe our lives are meant to be disrupted. Maybe it is ok that we can’t be present at what is in front of us, for a moment, because we have let ourselves be distracted by inconvenience. By love. By other’s needs. By a moment in time that is worth our full attention.

Even if no one sees, if no one else is paying attention to us.

Here is to being inconvenienced.