“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; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.”
(1 Cor. 13:4-8a)
I love LOVE. I love the idea of love and everything it stands for. I love the potential love has. The potential to: fix things, to care for things, and even the potential to lead me to fall in love in the future. I love to hope for a future full of love. Romantic love, familial love, brotherly love, sisterly love, I love all of it.
In the world, though, we get love wrong a lot of the time.
We use it as something self-seeking, self-fulfilling, and ultimately plain SELFISH. Love portrayed in media is often self-focused. We are told only to love someone when they love us. We are told we only DESERVE to be loved by the best and love only the best. Others don’t deserve our love if they aren’t good for us.
I’m not saying that is entirely wrong, but we are looking to find perfect love in imperfect places.
The Lord introduces us to the truth of love. He tells us that love does not envy, it is not rude, and it does not INSIST on its own way. Love is sacrificial, unconditional, and not repayable. In its honest and true form it is given freely without expectation of being returned or repaid.
Most of all it is forgiving.
If we truly love someone we are able to forgive them. If our love is not conditional, when we are hurt or lied to or forgotten our love should not change. Otherwise our love can become selfish.
I have struggled to forgive certain people in my life, people who have hurt me, sometimes on accident and sometimes intentionally. It’s hard to forgive people who haven’t necessarily put me first or loved me well, and people who have lied to me. Something I realize in order to grow in my love is that I first have to forgive some of those people who I am still holding love from.
Parts of my heart have forgiven them, aspects of my life show that by the way I live with them, but there are moments when they hurt me again that I remember all the hurts they have done against me. If I have truly forgiven them I will not remember those grievances. If I truly love them I will not expect them to do it again and wait to extend favor to them until they prove themselves trustworthy.
That’s not how love works.
Daily I mess up and need to be forgiven by God. I come to him time after time asking to be washed clean and the thing about his love is that it’s PERFECT. When he says he forgives me, he does. He forgives me to the point that he doesn’t even remember my transgressions.
He loves me, always.
And he is teaching me to love and be able to forgive without conditions.
