Howie (Groom), Lynn (Bride), Robert (Officiant-friend-Dad), and Micah Nowell (spiritual composer/musician)

This may seem counterintuitive.  It is a love story about a loving partnership that seemed  “lost forever,”  but then became resurrected …as the same Love!   

Love  —  through/in  Lin

When I first met Linda, we both knew, instantly (literally), that we had met the person we would marry and that there was no rational explanation for the circumstances involved or who was controlling or even influencing the direction our path would take (certainly not either of us).  

Love is as irrational as it is wonderful.  You’re along for the ride, …and you just Trust.  Love becomes all that really matters  (with all else — whether pleasurable or painful — becoming subordinated).

Later, we began to realize that all of it was being Divinely orchestrated …that we had both been given a sacred gift — a gift to humbly honor and for which to give earnest thanks.

Thus began our holistic (mind, body, and spirit), Life-partner relationship, in which we were united by the Holy Spirit in a Life together simultaneously in the world and in God’s “Eternal Now” in the world.  Such true Living is intended of God for us to choose to accept…if we will.

Forty-five years later, I lost Linda from the world, due to brain cancer.  After her third surgery and our family knowing by then that she was terminally ill, she sat me down to tell me something about which she had earnestly important sentiments.  She told me that after she was gone, she wanted me to find someone else with whom I could share love and enjoy the rest of my life.  

Thus, my dying wife was being utterly selfless with me, such selflessness characterizing her entire life of interactions with family, friends, and her students, as any of them would generously attest. 

Her entreaty was humbling and awesome for me to experience under the circumstances, and I expressed earnest appreciation to her.  But then I said that if I were to “look for” a life-partner with whom I could have a truly innocent Relationship, I would never find her, such  that I had no plan to try. 

Then I also said that IF the Lord were to present me with such a potential, I knew that I would recognize it …and accept it.  (The world was telling me — “Impossible.”   But my faith was telling me — “All will be well!” no matter what happens or does not happen in the world! Thus: Neither did I doubt nor did I expect that the Lord would provide me a new life-partner.  Rather, trusting in God and the Truth about what is Real is all that matters in the world.

About Linda’s illness and the moment of her death, (as well as about my entire grief-journey, which had begun with her diagnosis), I have written extensively, but that is not the subject here — I will only say this:  That just a few moments after her long, last breath, I rose to give thanks and praise for this incalculable blessing that God had given me in our sacred, innocent Relationship of 45 years.   

In the decade after, I grieved most certainly (and I still do), but I was genuinely happy, accepting of my grief and Living in God’s Love.

A decade is a long time in the world.  And then something happened that perfectly paralleled my meeting and relationship with Linda, with the only differences being superficial, in the way of the world. 

Love  Resurrected  —  through/in  Lynn

I had known Lynn for years as someone with whom I shared an innocent relationship.  “Innocent” — involving a level of trust in which the associated vulnerability actually brings freedom and happiness.  Like everyone, we both had troubles in our past, but we could share anything with one another, and we could readily manifest empathetic compassion in the process. We were good friends.

Then in April of 2023, a small series of events brought us together for a long conversation in which we knew that we were meant to be together.  These “events” seemed to be automatic, in that neither of us was deliberate or determinative in making them happen or happen in the way that they did. Not knowing where the bus was going, we simply got on. We both knew that it was the ride, together, that mattered.

In the weeks after she had returned to her operating room nursing job in North Dakota, we communicated extensively, and our relationship further deepened. A swirl of factors brought her back “home” to Franklin, and that was that. 

Along the way, I expressed my wonder about all this to Jesus the Christ, adding that whatever God’s Will may turn out to be for me and for Lynn, I will accept it, and I will know with surety (based on many previous experiences) that it will all have been for the Good, no matter what — for we are not to fret and worry.

So in May of 2024, we are married, the officiant, Robert Meredith, being her Dad and also one of my best friends since 1970, …and with songs sung by my dear friend and fellow-griever, Micah Nowell Dillon — one of the songs being of her own composition and perfectly resonant with the theme of our ceremony.

On the surface, Lynn is indeed much different from Lin  (and beware the human brain’s propensity to compare, contrast, …and to judge one another).  However, in every way that matters most, she is the same.  She knows all about Lin and about the nature of my grieving, and if it happens that I enter into a few moments of weeping grief, Lynn comes to me directly with arms of compassionate comfort — this is what God’s Love does!

Whether laughing the most hearty laugh or tearing and weeping together, we find ourselves in a state of pure empathetic resonance.  And we continue to find it as natural as it is important to be able to talk about any subject at all, no matter how incidental or how troubling.  This is a manifestation of loving  “innocence” in a relationship. 

Fears, self-doubt, and defensiveness melt away — this is what God’s Love does, bringing com-fort and en-couragement.  Being strengthened by the unreserved Love of God,  I am freed of the depression of grief.  This is simply a miraculous gift — one that would be impossible to explain in rational terms. 

God’s Love:  If we choose to,  we can recognize it — Know it — with more surety then our brain can process information we sense in the world.  Love—this sublime, unconditional, communicating/informing, empowering, connecting, inspiring, eternal  unifier.  About this, Lin and I were and are resonant.  And about this, Lynn and I are resonant. 

Thus it is that my unexpected love with Lynn now is for me a resurrected love.  Lin and Lynn, so different in the world, share with me the same eternal Love, as an incalculable, sacred, undeserved gift to savor, to treasure, and for which to be profoundly grateful.  Would that every human relationship were characterized in this way — and at the very least, that every life-partner relationship would be so.

This, then, is my story of  Love Resurrected.

With the dying and death of Linda in and from the world,

the Truth about what Love really is 

came to me more powerfully than ever before,

and I have learned that death is a lie told by the world.

So now with Love never having been lost,

I just allowed myself to be lifted onto the bus again …with Lynn,

and with the Driver I Know and Trust even more than before.

Such a sighting of Love Resurrected

can only be the result of another step along the way in my repentance-journey.

Indeed — I think,  in order to live in the world;   

whereas I Love, in order to Live in the Kingdom, …even simultaneously.

Truly, and beyond measure, I am a blessed man.

For me,  “love resurrected”  through/in  Lynn has accelerated a heightened dimension of God's love in my consciousness,  ...such that while my level of grieving my loss of Linda remains constant, my self-piteous mourning is declining, and I am experiencing increases in my sense of appreciation, gladness, and gratefulness for the Gift that Linda will always be.  Indeed, my eyes opening further, …I experience in Lynn the same Love!

​

Life is Relationship in God’s Love! 

And it is a conscious choice

…to be resurrected a hundred times each day.