Love is the Foundation

“Love is the foundation from which your decisions about your life should be made.”



Darren L. Johnson


I wonder, when people see this quote if they'll roll their eyes and think it’s too cliché. Will they have thoughts like, "Oh, this girl is so naive and hasn’t experienced enough yet?" Will they think, “Sure she feels this way now, but will she still feel like this after she’s been married for a while?” Or will they nod their heads in agreement and have stories of their own to share about love has affected decisions they’ve made in their own lives?


I’m getting married in less than a week. So, it’s probably very healthy and normal that love would be dominating my thoughts. But, I actually thought of something other than romantic love when I read this quote. Romantic love is wonderful and exciting, but it’s not the only love that resides in my heart.

This particular quote takes me back about 4 or 5 years, when my daughter was still in high school. I remember being irritated because there was a knock on the door well after polite visiting hours. I was in bed reading my book and trying to will myself to get sleepy (I’m still no good at that). Then out of nowhere there was a knock on the door that scared me half to death.


It turned out to be one of my daughter’s friends that I didn’t know very well at the time. We’ll call her Emma. There was something about her presence that made my angry heart melt a little bit, and I can’t even tell you exactly why that happened initially. But, I could sense that she truly needed to speak to my daughter.


I let the girls talk, still feeling slightly irritated. I was anxious to find out what was going on, but again, I had this intense feeling that Emma really needed to speak to my daughter. So, I left them alone for a little while and then the girls approached me with an idea I was very uncomfortable with.

They wanted to know if Emma could stay the night and possibly stay with us for a while. Hmm…



It turns out Emma’s mother was an alcoholic, drug addict. It also turned out that Emma had younger siblings she normally took care of because her mother neglected them. This was sounding a lot like my life as a teenager and I didn’t like it one bit. My heart completely opened up to Emma and I had this overwhelming need to love her and protect her.

Emma had run away that night because her mom’s newest boyfriend was raging out of control and her mother did nothing to shield her children from him. Emma got fed up, called the police, and quickly took off into the dark night. She knew the police would take her siblings to her grandmother and she just couldn’t take her life anymore and had to break away.

My heart breaks for Emma now just thinking about that night. But, it was an encounter that happened much later that truly made me understand the gravity of my decision to let her in and help her that night. Emma ended up living in a safe environment with her grandma, where she was not separated from her younger siblings. It wasn’t an ideal environment, but it was safe.

Emma came to my house frequently in the following year and began calling me mama. I thought that seemed a little extreme. I had really only helped her out that one night and I didn’t feel like I had done anything to warrant the loving title of mama.

Then she came by one day to give me a picture she had painted for me. She’s quite an artist and the picture is beautiful, but dark. It’s an almost black picture with a woman whose image lights up part of the canvass.


When I hugged Emma and thanked her for the picture she said she wanted me to know why she had painted that particular image for me. She told me I was her “light in the night”.

When she left home that night Emma didn’t know what was going to happen to her and she had no idea where to go or what to do. She wandered on the streets of Antioch in the middle of the night, speaking to several homeless men on the way (living near the train tracks).


She started to get scared and then she remembered where my daughter lived and thought she would see if my daughter could help her. She told me that if we hadn’t let her in that night and helped her she felt like she would have died.

I didn’t ask her if she meant she might kill herself or if she thought she would be harmed by someone else. It didn’t really seem relevant. She hugged me and told me she didn’t know what she would have done if I hadn’t been there for her.


Isn’t it amazing what a little bit of love can do in someone’s life? And to think, I started off angry that Emma had knocked on my door too late at night.