“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another,” he said, and this was just after he had washed their feet and predicted a double-whammy of betrayal and denial.

The world tells us that love is flowers and gifts and all-the-time-happy and pop songs, but we know the truth, deep down: it’s aching backs and ugly crying and waiting in hospitals and tense disagreements and holding sticky hands and taking the long view. In the middle of a week full of surgery, recovery, CT scans, sedation, pink eye, and landmark court cases, I hear the command, the mandatum from which we derive the designation Maundy Thursday, and I am floored by how much I have to learn about love. And that is where I am met: on the ground, by a God who stoops to wash feet; a husband who helps me retrieve the crumbs and forgives my need to control; a son who uses this as his pushing-off point to practice standing, then looks back and grins because he knows me. They all know me–and they love me anyway.

We all have to look up to love.