The greatest of these is LOVE!

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast,
it is not proud. It is not rude,
it is not self seeking, it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes
always perseveres.
.......
Love never fails. But where there are
prophecies, they will cease; where there
are tongues, they will be stilled;
where there is knowledge, it will come to pass away.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.

NIV... I CORINTHIANS 13: 4-13

This was the main verse I had read at our wedding. The reason is simple. It is about LOVE. The real kind of love that it takes to make a marriage work. The love God instills in your heart, and the love he allows someone else to give to you.
See, I got married at the mere age of 18;my husband was 19. People were not only full of doubt, but they were vocal about how "stupid" "immature" and "naive" we were to think that at the age we were, that we could make marriage work. At the time it angered me. Comments like, "you don't know what kind of toothpaste you want to use the rest of your life much less the person who you want to spend it with!", just infuriated me. How, could they judge? They couldn't see our hearts. They weren't in our shoes. However, I know now, that they were trying to protect us from a statistic, that truly seems unavoidable!
The statistics for couples that get married at less than 20 years old, and get divorced, is about 40%, and slightly higher if they don't have children(which seems odd...but true!)WE fit both of those bills. NO kids...and younger than 20. But what everyone(and it wasn't EVERYONE...but it felt like it sometimes) didn't or couldn't see is that, we KNEW what we were in for. We understood that marriage is WORK.More importantly we understood that LOVE is work. We have always said that Love is a VERB. You have to work at it. To fully understand this, I have established a little metaphoric story to help.
You see,LOVE is like a GARDEN. Falling in love is like planting the flowers. Easy. And at first you are most likely lucky. You get lots of rain, and sunshine. Your garden just seems to grow perfectly and things couldn't be better. People comment on how wonderful your garden is, and how they wish they could get their garden to grow like yours. You boast about your garden to co-workers, friends and family. A little time goes by, and you get so comfortable with the success of your garden, that you don't really notice that the rain has slowed, and the daylight is getting shorter. See you start to take it for granted. You continue on as if everything is as it was. But one day you happen to notice,weeds in your garden.You pull a few, but figure...your flowers still look good enough...better than most people's you know. And really you don't have time for this right now. SO, you continue on. You might toss a little fertilizer down in passing, but don't take the time to really water it in. Before long, you stop and notice that some of your flowers have actually died. You might worry for a bit, but realize...you still have over half of your garden, andyou convince yourself that that half seems to be thriving, and off you go with a jaded recognition of what is actually going on. As life takes over, you don't really think as much about your garden. Matter of fact, it isn't until you come home from work early one day, and realize... your garden has completely wilted. You quickly grab the hose, with the intention of properly watering your garden, but then the neighbor stops by and you once again neglect your garden. As life is still swirling around you, you simply take your garden for granted even more than before. You kinda know in the back of your mind that you NEED to give your garden some serious TLC, but it just gets lost in the mix of everyday life, and you WILL get to it...tomorrow. But tomorrow turns into months, and you try to convince yourself and others your garden is fine. When people ask you, how is your garden? What's new with that garden of yours? Planted anything new lately? You confidently respond with a smile, Yeah, yeah, the garden is great, yet quickly change the subject, as not to potentially have the truth revealed to anyone, especially yourself. However this truth eventually slams you in the face, as one Saturday afternoon, you finally make the time, to garden. Only, when you arrive you find, a dead, dried up, insect infested area, that only vaguely resembles the garden you once loved and were so proud of. You hurriedly try to save it. Grabbing watercans, fertilizer, shovels, and new soil. You try tirelessly to revive your garden. Moving from one aid to the next, hoping that there is SOMETHING left, of the garden you had. Soon, enough you plop down, tired and muddied. Wishing you had done more. Wondering why it wasn't enough now. Trying to retrace your steps over the last few months, and see what went wrong. Things started out so great. Yet the more you think about it...the easier it is to see now. If you had just taken the time, to water your garden. To feed it. To pull all of the weeds out. To notice the insects that were trying to destroy your garden, before they had the chance to succeed. Maybe, just maybe, if you had done more all along the way, you would still have that wonderful garden you had planted so long ago.
TO me, LOVE is the exact same. If we pay attention all along the way. If we watch for the signs. Nurture what is good, and rid it of what isn't,then we won't have to lose it all along.IN fact it will thrive and grow, and be plentiful! If we fight for it, instead of ignoring it. If we manage it, instead of waiting, we wouldn't have the divorce rates that we do now. Things wouldn't go dry and wilt. Success in LOVE is work. Just as a successful garden is work. Trying to put on a show, and pretending it is something it isn't, will only hurt you in the end. Giving up is easy! Anyone can kill a flower. However, getting it to grow into something you are proud of. Into a healthy and lively being is work. The same is true with love.
I believe I am still married today because we constantly garden our love. WE choose to fight. WE win as a team and lose as a team. We hold each other accountable, and we cheer each other on. We have had rough times. Even seemingly impossible times! Times when we thought the answer was throwing in the towel because neither of us wanted to "plow". But, because we couldn't look down the road and see our lives without the love we have for each other,and we couldn't throw all of the work we had done up until that point away. We choose to fight. And we fought these battles harder than we had ever fought before.
I am thankful that I have a husband who appreciates the work that love takes! After all anything worth having is worth fighting for!
So, I challenge each of you today, to ask yourselves, what have YOU done for your GARDEN today? Did you water it? Did you take the time to notice whether the leaves were turning brown? Or, did you trample over it on the way out the door, taking it for granted?