I started reading Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility this week, mostly because I wanted language for something I already suspected about my own marriage. He calls it the sincere gift of self, the idea that love only becomes real when a person stops being used and starts being given. Not given partly. Given.

That phrase has been sitting with me because I know how much of myself I’ve kept in reserve over the years. I give my time, mostly. My effort, when it’s convenient. But there’s a version of me I protect, the one who keeps a private accounting of what I’m owed, who still flinches at being asked for more than I planned to offer.

Jesus says it plainly in John’s Gospel: greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. I used to read that as a verse about martyrs. I’m starting to read it as a verse about Tuesday mornings, about who gets up with the baby, about whose preferences quietly lose every time.

Wojtyla isn’t writing about feelings. He’s writing about a choice, made and remade, to stop treating the person across from you as someone you negotiate with and start treating them as someone you’re given to. I don’t have that mastered. I’m not sure I’ve even started. But I’d rather know what I’m actually supposed to be doing than keep mistaking convenience for love.

Today’s Bible Study

Paul puts it even more plainly in Philippians. Before he tells the Philippians how to treat each other, he points them to Christ, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. That word, emptied, is the whole shape of it. Not managed. Not budgeted. Emptied. If that’s the pattern Paul hands the Philippians for ordinary relationships within the church, it’s hard to imagine it stops at the door of a marriage. Whatever I think love costs, it costs more than I’ve been paying.

Recommended Reading

Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility is where all of this is coming from this week, the book that first gave me the language of a sincere gift of self. It’s dense in places, but worth sitting with if any of this is landing the way it’s landing for me.