Brooding

Throughout my childhood, my mother liked to use a particular quotation from The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically said by Aslan to Lucy about why she should forgive a treacherous friend of hers in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: "She is weak, but she loves you."

Whenever I would get too furious or judgmental about someone in my life for not being as strong or as brave or as good as they should have been, my mom would say that. "She is weak, but she loves you." By this she meant be forgiving, because that person may not have much strength to draw on, but they do love you, and the goodness of loving and caring and meaning well indicates that there's something worthy of love about them.

I still remember all the times she said this to me, and it did make me think. But the older I get, the more and more my response becomes that there is a corollary-- "She is weak, but she loves you." "She loves you, but she is weak."

I don't know if that's right. But I'm coming to believe that if you love someone, you owe it to them to be strong. That doing the hard thing for them is part of loving.