Love Is...patient & kind
Just imagine...you walk into a room and immediately someone is yelling at you. Their tone, their face, their volume says it all, "I hate you!" You immediately feel despair, destroyed and distant. It feels undeserved and it feels contrary to everything you hope to experience. Can you envision the scenario? The simplicity of this scenario highlights the reality that love has distinct qualities that set it apart and make it uniquely experienced.
Love is patient and kind.
Love is a posture of one's heart, mind, actions and intentions that display patience. Love is patient. The longer I live, and the longer I experience relationships (my own and others), the more I believe patience truly is a primary identifier of love.
The most primary relationships we experience culturally are all intended, dare I say designed, to be long-lasting connections. We are born into families. A unit of people who are intended to love us. A unit of people who we are intended to love through the best, the worst and every moment in between. As a son and a sibling, I needed patience and I needed my family to be patient with me.
Let's take it a step further. As a married man, patience is a necessary gift I give my spouse because patience allows me to suspend the immediate desires or demands of self and choose a long view of connection. If I live a life of love that is saturated with patience, the urgency fades away because we are choosing something deeper and bigger than a single moment. Patience expresses a value and love for your spouse that they are always worth the wait.
Patience declares, "You are worth the wait my love!"
Love is kind. Kindness is a refreshing cold drink on a hot day. I might be going out on a limb, but I don't think I have ever met an individual that was disgusted by kindness. Kindness creates a tender, safe connection between two people. Kindness expresses worth and value to the recipient. Kindness allows us to lower our defenses so that we might receive love. Daily doses of kindness invite us to experience a life we might actually enjoy living.
Kindness allows us to believe we are treasured.
Love is patient and love is kind. How might you develop greater patience and greater kindness in the way you live your life?
Continue with me on the journey of love and check back for the next entry in the "Love Is..." series.
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
(1 Corinthians 13:4-7, NLT)