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Love at 70?

Posted by tyan (Singapore, Singapore) on 18 March 2008 in People & Portraits.

Tyan’s hubby guest appearance:

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Going to my father-in-law’s 70th birthday dinner brought back a lot of emotional feelings for my wife today and got me thinking about a lot of stuff.

I just realized it is very difficult to love someone genuinely. Our love could be motivated by selfish reasons or even when it is pure, hardly long-lasting.

Sometimes a father can put his honour and pride before his daughter. Sometimes a husband can put his own needs before his wife’s. Sometimes a mother can love her kids conditionally. Sometimes a son may love his dad out of obligation. Sometimes we love other people for show. So complicated, all on display today. Where is real, unadulterated love? Love without pretension and with no ulterior or selfish motives, and with no strings attached?

It’s really funny how we look at the world today and see how everyone dresses sophisticatedly, eats at the best restaurants, flash the latest gizmos, engage in really intellectual debates about the economy, politics and we all marvel at how society has progressed. And yet in the background, incessantly all the radio songs talk about how much love we need and hope to give. And love songs have been at it forever!! Apparently all the progress in society has not addressed all the deepest longings of our hearts.

I wish to dedicate this post to my wife and two boys. For my wife, I pray God would slowly heal her of all her emotional scars of not having known love early on. I pray when we reach seventy, we would just sit with each other, with a roof over our heads and to be in dry clothes and to have a hot chocolate in hand, talking to each other and reflecting how we have spent our lives trying to love others genuinely. For my two boys, I pray they would grow up knowing that God and their parents would love them no matter how they turn out and they would learn to love others genuinely as well. May God teach us.

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

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Canon IXUS 40
1/60 second
F/2.8
6 mm

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