Patience. The first quality that Paul lists for love. He had to start with the hard one.
We have a running joke in our small group: don’t ever pray for patience! I remember talking to a member of the group who had a fairly young relationship with God. During the prayer time at the end of the Bible study, she prayed that God would give her patience about a situation, and afterwards we teased her about it. “Don’t pray for that,” we told her, “because that’s one thing that’s never a gift. God always answers that prayer the hard way.”
Inside the teasing, though, as often happens, there is a truth. We get patient by having our patience tested over and over and over again. No one just is patient, and certainly no one becomes patient just by deciding to be.
But Paul says that love is patient. One of the things that says to me is that love is a quality that only comes with maturity. True, real, deep love comes through testing and trial and time. Anything that is instant can’t be love—feeling or choice, if it happens quickly and easily, it’s not love. But where’s the dividing line? At what point is long enough long enough? Well, maybe that is the point. If you have to ask the question, it’s not long enough yet—be patient and wait and you will know.
Love is willing to let it take as long as it takes. Love is willing to recognize that when we look into the future of something, any given period of time seems impossibly distant. It’s Christmas Day when I was child—it may only have been a few days to wait, but in those few days, glaciers would seem more like roaring rapids in comparison to how the nanoseconds crawled by. But on the other side, looking back, what was an eternity seems such a tiny thing, and I wonder why I agonized about it.
If you had told me when I first fell in love with my wife where I’d be twenty years later, I’d have said it would be impossible. First of all, twenty years is far too long to contemplate all in one chunk like that. But more importantly, if you had told me all of the many ways in those twenty years that I’d have taken advantage of my wife’s love, that I’d have been selfish and stupid and careless and thoughtless and anything but loving to her; if you’d told me all of the times that I’d have violated promises that I made to her—large and small; if you’d told me how far I’d have been and how far I am from what she dreamed her husband might be, I’d have told you there was no way it would last twenty years. And yet here I am, twenty years later, still in love with her (somehow), and she’s still in love with me, and we’re fighting through the pain and the trouble and the trials and tests that keep getting thrown at us. Somehow after twenty years together, we can still be patient and wait as long as it takes.
There are many things I wish I had in my life that I don’t have now, and many of them revolve around deep, honest, close relationships with other people. I haven’t been patient about it, though—in some cases, I’ve tried to force the issue, or I’ve given people a few chances and then given up on them, or I’ve made snap judgments about their value as a friend. In a very few cases, though, I’ve given it time, I’ve been patient, I’ve allowed the friendships to grow and develop on their own time, and in each case what I found was something far better than I ever imagined it could be. Until I got impatient and forced it to be something it couldn’t be, and in each of those cases, the relationship was destroyed and I saw the cost of the impatience.
Love must be patient, because real love can’t be manufactured or willed into being. True love, Godly love, is more interested in eternity than in today.
[Postscript: Ironically, shortly after posting this, I saw this article on MSN that addresses the same basic issue, though from a decidedly different point of view. I found it interesting that the columnist's idea of "patience" was that one should take at least 3 months in a new relationship before deciding whether it is love. The sad part is there are probably people who would read that and think they can't possibly wait that long....]
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