Love is Like a Greased Pig

By Mark Gungor

“I just don’t feel what I used to feel for you.”
“I love you, but I’m not in love with you anymore.”
“I believe I’ve found my soul mate…and it isn’t you.”
Or as the Righteous Brothers sang, “You’ve lost that loving feeling.”

However people want to word it, the bottom line is this: The fabulous and intense experience of our early love isn’t there anymore. I guess it wasn’t true love after all.

In the wonderful movie classic, The Princess Bride, the cotton-mouthed, speech-challenged priest talks about “true love” (Or “twuuuu wuv” as he says it!) at the wedding ceremony of Princess Buttercup and Prince Humperdink. He states that true love will follow you forever. While it makes for a great movie line, in reality it is a bunch of nonsense. True love doesn’t follow you like a little puppy that is constantly there. It’s actually more like a greased pig! You have to chase after it and pursue it. You have to run it down and tackle it and when it gets away, you go after it one more time. You may finally get a hold of it for a while, but then the little rascal can slip away and you have to chase it down again.

I know, I know—a greased pig isn’t all that romantic of an analogy to use, but it surely is more realistic and more accurate! Men and women who ascribe to all this romantic fantasy stuff will be sorely disappointed. So many people actually think that love and marriage will always be easy; that it will always be a skip through the meadow with birds chirping and butterflies flitting and the orchestra playing in the background. They think that the emotional high and buzz they experience at the beginning of dating or marriage will always be there. “Our love is true love and it will never fade!” That’s why so many people become disillusioned once they get into marriage—and sometimes it doesn’t take very long at all. They think that they have “fallen out of love” with their spouse once the flames of passion begin to die down to a smoldering ember.

Of course, our feelings change over time. There is no way that the initial euphoria can go on and on. It gives way to a deeper and more mature kind of love. The stages of marriage have been well documented in the research. That initial high that people experience at the onset usually only lasts six months to two years. Once the buzz is gone, the mistake that people often make is to allow their “feelings” to dictate their actions. They don’t feel that rush of emotion that they associated with love in the beginning and therefore, they assume they aren’t in love any more. Then naturally, since they don’t feel love, they reason (wrongly) that they must be true to their feelings. As a result, many

Stepping Out For Jesus

Saint Philip Neri (1515-95) must have had a good cobbler, because he sure put a lot of miles on his shoes. He sauntered through Rome, striking up conversations with whomever he met, beggars or bankers, warming hearts as he talked about God. Often, he’d bid them walk and talk with him en route to

Lyons Coffee Roasters @LyonsCoffeeAL in Florence, Alabama announces reopening! Oh Happy Day!

I am overjoyed to learn of this OUTSTANDINGLY EXCELLENT news!

Happy Day!

You’ve read the headline, so you “know” something of the “bottom line.”

A few weeks back, I had written a thoughtful Op-Ed about the matter entitled “Why the LGBT community should support Shirey Ice Cream in Florence, Alabama,” and encouraged peaceful reconciliation.

In part I wrote…

“An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” does nothing more than increase eyeless, toothless people. It multiplies injury, and eventually claims everyone.

“On the other hand, in stark contrast, love covers a multitude of sins.

“Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Do good to those who hate you. Let the light of your good deeds shine so brightly so that many others can see it, who will then give praise to your Heavenly Father because of them.

“Those ideas are truly revolutionary values.”

I do not know whether or not

Ten Great Tips for 2011: #9

Happy Wednesday, also sometimes known as “Hump Day”!

Why “hump”?

Well, we’re half way over, and the middle is sometimes called the “hump.”

Yeup…

Hold on, baby… Friday’s comin’!

And you know what this means, don’t you?!

It’s time once again for our weekday installment of… Ten Great Tips for 2011!

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen… on this 19th day of January, I give you #9!

Ten Great Tips for 2011: #1

As promised, here is the first of “Ten Great Tips for 2011!”

Sam… in memoriam.

A dear, longtime friend of mine recently made a difficult and heart wrenching decision to euthanize his beloved pet. He is an excellent writer, and shared about his decision in the following post.

“On Saturday September 18th, I lost something else that meant the world to me. I finally had to make that awful decision to put my oldest dog Sam, to sleep. I admit it was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make. With deeply loved pets, it is the ultimate contradiction: Along with the joy of ownership comes the agony of responsibility. Like anything that you love, you always know in the back of your mind that the day will eventually come when you have to let it go. Even though you know, you can never quite prepare yourself for it fully and you still can never quite say goodbye. I knew someday the day was going to come for Roxie, but I did not have to make the decision for her, as I did with Sam. Roxie passed away before I had the chance to make it. Sam was a different case. She was