I’m meditating on the love passage in 1 Corinthians these next several days as we enter February beginning with: Love is patient.
It’s tempting to isolate each of these attributes of love and feed ourselves a message of try harder. To tell ourselves that we need to will ourselves to better patience. But this way of thinking is built upon a faulty foundation, a foundation that believes we are capable of self-perfection and we’re just not trying hard enough. It’s a wearying journey. And love calls us to patience with others and also with ourselves.
When we notice a lack of virtue in our lives, it’s obvious that we have a responsibility to usher in change. But perhaps our regular course of action comes from a place of misdirection. We have a tendency to attempt treating the symptoms without tracing them back to their source.
The description of love found in 1 Corinthians is the description of a life in right relationship with God. This is what we aspire to. This is what we were created for. And when we notice a deficiency in our love, it’s less of an indicator that we need to implement rigid discipline and more about an invitation to come back and examine where our relationship with God is deficient, where it has become misaligned, where we are withholding.
A life of walking with God is a journey of constant refocus, of daily realignment. Another word for patience is long suffering. Patience is this acknowledgement that we’re ever becoming, we’re not yet who we will be and neither is anyone else. So we take a deep breath and inhale grace. We pause. And we exhale the same. Patience is acceptance of the process of our humanhood and gratitude for a God who models it for us perfectly.
