How Do You Define Love?

As a high school senior, I experienced the sweetest definition of love. Lois and Bob Pratt, my principal at Adelphian Academy in Holly, Michigan, USA, took me into their home and changed my life forever. They loved me and gave my life stability.

I learned many elementary things, such as removing the doily on a table and dusting the entire tabletop, not just around the doily.

Bob allowed me to be a reader for the Bible Doctrines class he taught. I was amazed he trusted me to grade my own paper. As a reader I was able to contribute toward the cost of my education. Mom Pratt took me shopping and outfitted me from head to toe for graduation weekend. With great wisdom they shipped me off to Emmanuel Missionary College (now Andrews University) the day I graduated from academy. I sent them a thirty-page letter the first week. I missed them so desperately. They officiated at my wedding in 1958 and brought me back into their home while my husband served in the army and I was expecting my second child. Mom Pratt took a leave from her nursing job and assisted in the delivery of Steven at the hospital where she had previously worked as head of Labor and Delivery.

Their daughters babysat my five-year-old daughter Sharilyn during that time. When marriage turned to divorce, they never gave up on me.

Throughout my life, I yearned for the maternal love my mother, who suffered from her own losses, had been unable to provide. I kept trying to win her love, but it never happened. I missed the love of my father, who had abandoned me.

My parents divorced when I was four, and I never saw him again until I was seventeen. I chose to define love by becoming a hospital chaplain assistant, where I mirrored God’s love for me in my volunteer pastoral assignments.

Love meant sharing supper with a friend, giving her a respite from the bedside of her dying grandson. Love meant using my meager talents to counsel others in need. Love meant buying a new dress for an academy student and giving her phone cards, snacks, and bedding for her dorm room at Cedar Lake Academy.

Thank You, God, for the people who defined love for me in practical ways and filled my life with demonstrations of Your care and comfort.

May we all define love in this manner.

Patricia Hook Rhyndress Bodi