Enduring Love
Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 13:7
Love…endures all things…
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
This statement on the vulnerability of love is worth reading over again. It’s true. Love isn’t always a romantic, heart-warming experience. When you love someone, you hold your heart out and give another person the opportunity to do damage to it.
The answer to the vulnerability of love is not withdrawing from loving others. It isn’t even being willing to love as long as we reciprocally receive love. Christian love demands of us a love that is willing to endure and persevere through desert days when the ground on which we trod is hard and dry, watered only by the tears falling from our eyes.
Christian love doesn’t stop loving when the loving gets tough.