My Beloved
As a very intelligent mama friend succinctly said, “The stomach bug is no joke!”
Being a sick mum with little babes at home leads to, pretty much, one thing – survival mode! My toddler has watched more Netflix in a week of Mama Sick Time than he usually would in three weeks. On one of the really bad days I laid my baby down for his nap and then popped on the TV just so that I could try to nap while my three-year-old watched Noddy, the Toyland Detective! Before passing out on the couch next to my toddler detective, I read through a devotional that I was reading with friends. As I am apt to do, I got distracted, and before I knew it, almost thirty minutes had gone by. The provocative nature of Song of Songs is the only explanation for how I could have stayed awake that long.
Later that night, after a horrific incidence of shower puking, chills, and shaking, I went back in my mind to this verse:
“My beloved spoke and said to me, “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me” (Song of Songs 2:10).
No joke. I kept thinking about that verse and the YouVersion image that I had made for it earlier in the day. In my thirty minutes of toddler couch time I had texted it to my husband because I thought, ‘I would jump up and arise for you ANY TIME if you spoke to me like that!’
Just hours after initially reading that verse, I was wrapped in my bed with a heating pad and I listened to my husband use the plunger in our shower just to clean up the disgusting mess that I had left in there. In that moment of half-witted awareness, I realized that while my husband did not communicate like the speaker in Song of Songs, his actions were completely based in love. Have you ever heard of the term ‘hesed’? I first heard it while working through a study of the Book of Joshua by Jen Wilkins, and then it came up again in a local group called The Right Weigh God’s Way. Hesed is a complex word, and perhaps difficult to nail down when translating into English, but it can be simplified as the idea of love in action. While my husband does not address me as ‘My beloved,’ I know that his heart holds me up to the spirit of that term’s warmth and beauty.
My mind did not stop there though. I started to think about how Jesus calls all of us to Himself in that way, if we are receptive enough to hear it. Whether one reads Song of Songs as a conversation between lovers or an allegory for Christ’s love for the Church, it has a deep, intricately woven beauty to it that is unlike any other part of the Bible. It is special.
I hope that I can hold onto this idea of being the ‘beloved,’ both to our Savior and to my usually quiet, garage-drawn husband. I am glad that my mind was taken back to this verse amidst the nasty pain of a stomach bug, but I hope for the wisdom to call on this title in the moments of health and joy too. There is a sense of beautiful worth that comes with being someone’s beloved, and that’s no joke either!