loved

I look at the pictures, pictures of my people and me, and I frown. Is my face really that round? I draw my fingers out toward the edges of the screen, attempting–without luck—to magnify the dark ache in my heart. Why did I have to smile so big? In the picture, my eyes look like two joyful slits. I sigh and look away.

Stop, now. Somebody loves that face.

The comment, in a voice entirely other than mine, slices through my thoughts, and I pause on a picture of Kevin smiling at me, this man who loves me in every season—smiling or cheeks wet with tears; in my comfortable shorts with the holes in the legs; without makeup; sweaty, with gritty cheeks and salty lips; just clean, wet hair hanging in ropes about my cheeks; laughing silly or completely wronghearted; overweight or under; healthy or ugly sick. I am his and he is mine. I can see the clear truth: I am loved. I am more than the things about me that will pass away with time. I know this, and still I expect something unreasonable from myself, something no one who loves me expects.

I had prayed, all those years ago, to share my life with a man who would point me to God. And now, searching the picture, I realize that for years Kevin’s love has pointed me to God, to the way God never stops loving me. Even when I go blind, I’m loved.

Before the picture that day, a friend I had not seen in a while put his hand on my arm and said, “Your husband’s good for you, isn’t he?” He said this looking right past my smile. “You look more vibrant all the time,” he said, nodding his head in approval. An old line from a Beatles song threaded through my mind, something I’d heard all new the other day, tapping my thumb against the steering wheel: “Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time/ It’s easy/ All you need is love….”

“Yes,” I said honestly then, grinning, and I smile now, remembering, thinking that’s likely the reason I seem to be bursting with happiness in the pictures.

“Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life,” Henri Nouwen wrote, because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ So today I stand actually rejecting my own joy, and with it foundational truth, the great news that I’m forever loved. I nearly forgot there’s a nasty thief hell-bent on stealing everything truly valuable, hell-bent on convincing me to forsake my real identity. He almost had me, until. My finger hovers over the screen, paused, bent, pointed over the picture of my husband loving me. Hard to argue with that.

I scroll on, and in one of the photos, Riley laughs so wildly I can almost hear the sound now as I look. Joy pushes her back on her hips, revealing the curve of her belly. She peeks around my shoulder and giggles, pointing toward the screen.

“Mom Jones, look at how I’m laughing,” she says, grinning full, re-living. “That was funny.”

I turn and look at her face, all lit and bright.

“What?” she says.

“Oh, I’m just smiling at you because I love you,” I say, which is true–it will always be true, but I’m also thinking about what Riley didn’t say when she saw the picture. She has no disparagement for any of us and no criticism of her own round bump, just more joy over joy already exploding. And what would I say to her now if she did point it out to me, spitting out the flat facts, her finger hovering over? Stop, now. I love that round belly. I’d remind her that she was once very thin because she couldn’t eat. In those days, anxiety kept her hungry, and thin looked anything but healthy for her to me. But just now, we need not revisit that gnawing pain.

“Yes, you do,” Riley erupts, gleefully giggling, swinging back again on her hips just like in the picture. “I’m one of your favorite people, Mom Jones.”

I have to stop looking at the pictures, now; I have to turn and wrap my arms around the warm, solid substance of her, because it’s a fact. I am hers and she is mine.

I am loved. She is loved. You are loved. And no one’s gonna steal that joy.