Skip to main content

Love does

             Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (I Corinthians 13:6-7)

And today, love isn’t red but continues in black before – thankfully – turning white. Love does not delight in evil. And today, that’s a huge problem. We do evil. I would go so far as to say that we are evil. We may struggle against it, but when the day is done, it’s highly doubtful that any of us got through it without doing anything evil. And we tend to want others to accept and approve of our evil. We may say they should forgive our evil, but in reality, it’s not about forgiveness. It’s easy to claim things we (or our loved ones) do are not evil, and give ourselves permission to delight in them, but that’s not love.

But, ahh. We finally turn from everything that is not love or loving, or that love is or does not, to things love does. Rejoices with the truth. Always protects. Always trusts. Always hopes. Always perseveres. And out comes the examination table. Starting with “always,” the best that we can say about anyone except God is that we are a work in progress. We don’t always love and even when we love, we may not love well. We are not always loved, even by those who claim to love us. When we are loved, we may not be loved well. God is the only exception, but when we look at God’s love for us, we can easily see Him as less than loving, because our idea about love amounts to worship.

Now, always protects. We have the same problem. What does it mean that we always protect? Co-dependency? Aiding and abetting in criminal or wrong activities? Enabling? What does it mean that God (or anyone) always protects? Never facing hardships? The same codependence, enabling, aiding and abetting only this time we get the cover? What if protecting also means protecting us, or others, from ourselves? I suspect I need a lot of protection from myself, but that means things not going my way.

Always trusts. I’m working on this, but I suspect I don’t trust well. Again, what happens when someone breaks our  trust for our own good? Or we for theirs? How do we hope when our selfish hopes have been dashed because the person who loves us wants what’s best for us?  What happens when our loved one’s hopes are dashed because they either have unrealistic expectations or we simply aren’t able for some reason? What happens when  the lover fails to persevere?

                And the answer to those questions is that when the lover fails in any of these ways, the beloved become a lover, and rejoices with the truth, protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Shepherd!

                 “I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep . (John 10:14) God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Genesis 3:14) The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths     for his name’s sake. Even though I walk     through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil,     for you are with me; your rod and your staff,     they comfort me. (Psalm 23:1-4) For the Jews, it was politically incorrect to make claims about yourself as a teacher (or possibly as anything else.) Teachers were expected to take pride in the...
Post a Comment
Read more