I recently came across a question that stayed with me:

What does it really look like to love your wife like Christ?

My first thought was my father.

I don’t know if my father ever thought about marriage in those theological terms. I don’t remember him talking about what it meant to love a wife like Christ loved the church.

But I watched him.

And sometimes I think there are things we learn about love long before we know how to put them into words.

We didn’t grow up with much.

There were times when there simply wasn’t enough food for all of us. I remember my mother making sure everyone ate, sometimes feeding us by hand so she could make sure each child got something.

Those were difficult years.

And my father worked hard.

There were times when he had to work away from home because that was where he could earn enough to provide for us. He would come home on weekends, and when it was payday, he would sometimes bring cakes home from the city.

Looking back, I know those cakes weren’t really about cake.

They were about a father who had been away from his family and came home wanting to bring a little something with him.

Eventually, he moved us to the city so that we could all be together.

He wanted his family close.

He wanted to provide.

He wanted to take care of us.

But what I remember most now isn’t simply that my father worked hard for our family.

It is the way he loved my mother.

Because my father didn’t seem to believe that being the one who provided placed him above her.

He could come home from work and still help in the kitchen.

When my mother was sick, he took care of her.

And he did these things with such humility.

There was never a sense that serving my mother somehow made him less of a man.

If anything, I think he understood something that I didn’t have the words for when I was young.

That loving someone means being willing to bend.

Not because you are beneath them.

But because love doesn’t always ask who is above whom.

Love asks,

“How can I care for you?”

My father wasn’t perfect.

I don’t want to make him into someone he wasn’t simply because he is no longer here.

He was human, with his own imperfections and shortcomings.

But he loved my mother the best way he knew how.

And there was something beautiful about the humility with which he did it.

He never made her feel that she was beneath him.

He never treated her as though providing for the family gave him the right to demand more from her while giving less of himself.

He loved her in the quiet, ordinary places where love is actually tested.

And maybe that is why, years later, when I read about a husband being called to love his wife as Christ loved the church, my mind goes back to my father.

Because Christlike love isn’t about standing above someone.

It is about giving yourself for them.

It is about choosing service when you could choose comfort.

It is about humility when pride would be easier.

It is about caring for another person’s heart as something precious entrusted to you.

Jesus washed feet.

The King of Kings knelt.

And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things about Christ’s example.

He showed us that greatness doesn’t need to announce itself.

Sometimes greatness looks like kneeling.

Sometimes love looks like serving someone who could never repay you.

Sometimes love looks like coming home tired and still finding a way to care for the person waiting for you.

I saw some of that in my father.

Not perfectly.

Not always in grand ways.

But consistently enough that it became part of what I understood love to be.

As a child, I simply saw my father taking care of our family.

As I grew older, I began to understand that I was watching a husband love his wife.

And perhaps that is one of the gifts our parents leave us without ever realizing they are giving it.

They show us what love looks like when nobody is writing about it.

When there is no audience.

When there is no applause.

Just two people sharing a life and deciding, day after day, to care for one another.

My father passed away in 2021.

There are things I wish I could ask him now.

There are stories I wish I could hear from his own voice.

But there are also things I don’t need him to explain.

I saw them.

I grew up watching them.

And now, when I think about what it means to love like Christ, I think about a man who worked hard to provide for his family but never allowed provision to become a position of power.

A man who could serve his wife without feeling diminished by it.

A man who understood, perhaps without ever saying it, that loving his wife did not make him her master.

It made him her husband.

And maybe that is the part of his example I carry with me most.

That real love doesn’t need to stand over someone to prove its strength.

It can kneel.

It can serve.

It can be gentle.

It can give without keeping score.

It can say, in a thousand quiet ways,

“You are precious to me, and I will take care of what has been entrusted to me.”

I learned about loving like Christ from Scripture.

But I also learned something about it from my father.

And when I look back now, I realize that perhaps one of the greatest things he gave my mother wasn’t simply a roof over her head or food on the table.

He gave her the humility of a man who never believed that loving his wife meant being above her.

He was willing to bend toward her.

To serve her.

To care for her.

And in doing so, he showed me something I hope I never forget:

The love that looks most like Christ isn’t the love that stands above us.

It is the love that willingly kneels.