At Christmastime, humanity rises up in a frantic hunt for the feeling of love. If you aren’t loved at Christmas, we reason, when will you be? So we marathon Hallmark movies, overbook our schedules with parties, and drop our change in the bell ringer’s bucket, waiting for the warm fuzzies to descend.
When people ask how long my husband and I have been married—usually subsequent to us holding hands in a public place—I still get plenty of condescending smiles accompanied by, “Oh, so you’re still in the honeymoon phase.” That little sentence seems to boil down to “You haven’t really experienced marriage yet. Just you wait.” According to these well-meaning critics, hormones are the only plausible explanation for my happy marital state.
My husband and I tend to say we had an arranged marriage. We married without the butterflies, without the heart palpitations, without the fairy-tale smittenness simply because we knew we were better people together. We skipped the grand romantic gestures (although proposing with refrigerator magnets does earn an A+ for creativity). For me, dating, marriage, and love have always been more choice than emotion.
Scripture consistently portrays love as an action rather than a feeling. Love pursues the better of the other. “For God so loved the world” isn’t God peering down from heaven, crooning over how sweet we are and how we make his heart flutter. The world God sent his Son into was hardly one to croon over. “God so loved” is choice. God so chose to pursue the betterment of the world that he sent his only Son.
Any sort of commitment requires continuous choice. God chooses to pursue my good; my husband and I choose to pursue each other. The same principle applies to anything else we claim to love.
Despite my highfalutin theories on marriage, I constantly stumble over this emotional expectation in my creative process. I sit down to write and wait for the warm fuzzies of inspiration to hit. Art is supposed to make you feel something, right? Why else would we watch all those Hallmark movies? But even in the creative process, emotions should be a wonderful side effect, not the driving force. I love my art when I choose to act, to write, to paint, to edit.
We tend to idolize people who create art “because they love it.” We imagine Leonardo DaVinci picking up a paint brush, and because he just loves painting so much a literal bolt of inspiration strikes him and he paints the Mona Lisa. If I just loved my work, my spouse, my art a little more, this would be easier.
Stephen King says, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I can wait for a burst of twitterpation, or I can do the work of choosing my husband. I can stare at my blank canvas and wait for inspiration, or I can open my paints and do the work. If I take my art seriously, I deny myself the luxury of waiting for the warm fuzzies. The artists, dreamers, parents, and poets willing to choose to love offer generosity in a world of scarcity. When you make creativity a choice instead of waiting for emotion, you free yourself to offer bountiful art to the world. Love as choice brings us out of scarcity and into plenty.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.