Love Is

We all know the passage, right?

”Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful…love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

It’s easy, and helpful, to periodically hold up the “love” we confess for another, any other really, against this bench mark of true love. As an exercise it can help us find where our love is thin and needs shoring up. If we’re wise parents we will set this standard before our children and help them to examine the love for their siblings and friends to ensure that they learn how to love in a real doing sense and not just an emotional one.

But have you ever considered laying the love you confess to God side by side with this metric? I hadn’t but maybe that’s just me. I can be a little slow I think to pick up on things that those around me have already grasped. But thankfully God knows my frame and gives me ample opportunity to get it.

It had been a hectic morning on the farm. I could give you a laundry list of how everything seemed to be skidding out of control but suffice it to say things were not going as planned. Have you ever heard the phrase, “another Norman Rockwell moment going up in flames”? It wasn’t quite that bad but it was certainly no shining moment of domestic bliss; more like juggling flaming balls of fire.

To be honest, while we all have those moments, there is something a little extra about needing to deal with them while also being the main caregiver for a person with dementia. I’m not sure if it’s like this for everyone in this same role but part of what makes it so darn hard for me is the constant fight with myself to not resent the impact it has on my life.

So there I was with fireballs in motion and I look out the window and see how everyone else just seemed to be going about tending things, literally just getting done what needed getting done and I wasn’t part of that; I was stuck inside unable to not only help but actually participate. And I will confess that it was just so difficult for me.

I was reminding myself that it wasn’t very loving of me to resent that The Farmer could just go next door and help the neighbor unload dirt. And this time that reminder to look at how I was loving the people in my life took a step farther and I found myself confronted with the knowledge that actually what I wasn’t doing was loving God. Because I was resenting the limitations and boundaries the circumstances I found myself in, that I knew good and well came from the hand of my Father, had on my life.

Basically I had a choice to make. I could be fussy and resentful, which is nothing short of being arrogant (as if I knew better than God Almighty) and insisting on what I deemed good, and be irritable about the work he had given me or I could choose to bear up under the weight of being in his will; I could believe that he withholds no good thing from his faithful child, I could place my hope in the completed work of his Son, and I could persevere.

This morning I was reading the book of James and thought back to this day and I knew it was the perfect example of what he meant when he is talking about greeting trials with joy because they produce patience or, as the ESV translates it, long suffering. It’s actually the ancient Greek word hupomone that describes an active endurance. One commentary describes it as the quality of waiting more like what helps a person finish a marathon as opposed to sitting in a waiting room.

Hupo means under and mone which come from the word meno which means to stay, abide, and remain. At it’s root it means to remain under; as in someone under a heavy load choosing to stay there instead of looking for escape. One Greek commentator says this patience or longsuffering is the frame of mind which endures.

Sometimes circumstances are just flat out hard. But this is the mindset I want to cultivate…the one that will endure.

As we big Holy Week it is clear that this is the mindset, the patience or longsuffering, Christ himself must have had as he readeis himself for what was to come in a few short days.

May we all look at our circumstances and choose to pursue this same mind set. We can overcome simply because he overcame far more on our behalf.

This is the love we have been given.