If you can’t handle thorns, how can you ever expect to hold a woman?

Roses were meant to be this way: to entangle their beauty and delicacy in a maize of twisted barbed wire. Perhaps to protect as much as anything. Perhaps to injure those who try to approach the beauty carelessly, but even those who are careful will risk injury. It is to be expected, for love costs.

• Love means to be misunderstood.
• Love means being rejected.
• Love means the things that are important to you will not always be treated by another with the same value and care that you put to them.
• Love means sacrifice.
• Love means being vulnerable and being vulnerable almost always means you will get hurt.
• Love means giving up yourself — having your selfishness torn from you in a manner that leaves you defenseless. This is perhaps the most painful of all the activities of love, since we are all so protective of ourselves. We have all found comfort in ourselves — in our own ways of doing things. The proverbial marital battle over how to properly squeeze toothpaste out of a tube is not insignificant. It is a small picture of the larger struggles of ways and means.

There is comfort in the self. With years of self-talk, we have talked ourselves out of our guilt and our shame. We have developed ways of dodging the truth that shields us from truth’s double-edged probing. We can perpetuate almost any reality in our own minds. In the safety of our own personal self-propaganda, there is no one to challenge us, no one to disagree.

But fortunately for us, it is a thin membrane that protects the self, and love’s thorns can puncture it with ease and tear it open. This is the painful service that love provides for us: it strips away our protective layer leaving us open to both hurt and love, and since we are human and fallible, we cannot love without hurting or be loved without being hurt.

Hold the rose and feel the thorns.

To look after a woman in the same manner in which he looks after his own needs and wants is a severe test for any man.

Most men think they got something when they got married, few see marriage in terms of what they give up, and yet this is the fundamental truth for which marriage is the prime human example. “Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy” (Ephesians 5:25).

What does it mean for a man to give himself up for his wife? For Jesus Christ it meant losing his reputation and becoming a servant. It meant humbling Himself and becoming obedient to something other than His own interests. For God to lose His reputation and give up the honor due Him is no small thing. For a man, it means he doesn’t need any attention. He simply turns his attention off himself and onto his wife. He is over all his insecurities and need for approval. If he never got it, then he is over never getting it. If he got too much, then he is over being special. He does not allow self-indulgence; he lives for someone else. Whether he got praise or didn’t get praise, it doesn’t matter since he sees himself as a servant either way. He is a giver of praise not a praise-seeker. Here is a man whose
wife is more important than his reputation. And to get to this place is painful. None of this comes naturally. For Jesus, it came by way of a cross. No man can expect any less painful a path.

In the book, The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks, Noah Calhoun has to learn to cope with his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease — the thief of hearts and souls and memories. Whenever he tries to get near his beloved — to take the flower in his arms once again — he is stabbed by an armful of thorns. She does not know him. She distrusts him. She is belligerent with him. She is beyond his reach. But Noah has discovered that to love is to lose oneself, and so all his attentions are given over to loving this woman who does not know him anymore, whatever the cost. He just keeps on loving. He gets more thorns than flowers, but one whiff of a bloom is enough to keep him going. It is a tender story of how far love can go, and how thorny the path may be.

Jesus wore a crown of thorns. For Him, it was a hard-earned trophy.

And finally, to refer back to the song we highlighted a few days ago, you don’t lose your love when you say the word “Mine,” as long as you mean by that: my responsibility. My sacrifice. My woman to love more than myself, today, tomorrow, and forever.

(Tomorrow being Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to start Roses on Wednesday. She may anticipate something tomorrow, but next week…)

(Click here to check out our recent interview with Randall Balmer over his new book,

Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America.)