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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.

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