I Wish I Had Someone to Love Me Like That

Five years ago I hung on tightly to a tow rope with my knees shoved against my chest and my body bobbing in the water. Dorothy called instructions to me from the boat, explaining how I needed to lean and what to do with my water-ski tips. Finally with the roar of the boat engine, on the thirteenth attempt, I got up out of the water and made cautious trips around the lake until my aching, 35-year-old chest and arm muscles gave up and I sank into the water.

Dorothy, forty years my senior, finally got her chance and gracefully rose out of the water on her first try while her husband Marvin steered the boat for the last run of the day. Last week my family visited them. Marvin walked very slowly with a walker or cane. Dorothy slumped her weary, medicated body in her chair, her white head bobbing sleepily while a high-pitched, rodent repelling whining noise filled our ears. A tragedy of old age? Hardly! Yes, it’s sad to see someone you love suffering. The Bible tells us, “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). That’s the horrible effect of our sin and disobedience to God.

But there’s more to Marvin and Dorothy’s story than that. We live in a world where people use someone else for their own personal pleasure. When that pleasure is gone, they move on to someone else. A colleague of mine always used to nervously straighten up and apply her make-up before going home to her husband. She feared him leaving her, again, and wanted to pass his inspection. It wasn’t enough; he moved out for another woman.

A caregiver, watching Marvin sitting day after day by his wife’s side, hearing him call her “honey,” and watching him painfully walk over to serve her every need, said, “I wish I had someone to love me like that!” Who wouldn’t crave a love that keeps on flowing our way when we have nothing to give back? We do have someone who loves us like that! Marvin learned to love his wife from his Saviour Jesus Christ. “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

We’ve all done many acts of disobedience to God. One, just one, “little” lie deserves punishment by a righteous God who hates sin, and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). But God loved us when there was nothing in us to attract His love. Marvin told me, not that He was living a tragedy, but that God was using his situation as part of His plan to show a love that flows from God to people like us who don’t deserve it. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

Will you receive, as Marvin has, the only Saviour of sinners like yourself ?