Before I start pontificating, let me confess that patience is not one of my long suits. I want everything yesterday whether it be from my spouse, my kids, my grand kids, waitress, checker, or even God. I guess it comes from the "microwave" society we live in. Everything happens instantly (if you don't believe it try keeping up with the price of gas). So today I am speaking as much to me as to you. In fact, in all my blogging, God has me say what I need to hear. And, boy, do I need today's blog.
Why do you suppose that the first thing listed in the definition of love is patience? I have been doing a lot of thinking and reading on the matter and I think there are there are three reasons why patience would come first,
The first reason is that we were created as humans to grow and mature. Just because you marry someone does not mean they will grow up instantly. You can't just add water and poof, you have Prince Charming. You can't marry someone to change them. That's God's job and sometimes we as women get in God's way of maturing our husbands by enabling their bad behavior (If I just love him enough, he will change. Yeah, right.) We have to give one another time to mature and discover how a mature person acts (I'm not sure I have figured that out yet and I'm 52!)
The next reason is that we are sinful creatures in need of forgiveness. When I mess up (which I do frequently and big time), we need to know that those that love us will forgive us. Jesus told us that we were to forgive one another 70 x 7. That's a lot of forgiving. Please don't misunderstand me here. You can forgive someone and not continue to subject yourself to abusive behavior (that's a subject for another time.) To forgive someone is to release their control over you and transfer that control to God to do whatever it takes to turn them into what HE wants them to be.(Did you get that? What HE wants them to be not what ME wants them to be.)
Finally, He wants us to be patient so that we can learn to trust Him instead of ourselves. Let me give you an example. My husband laughs at me every summer because I will continue to water what he calls "dead things". Those are plants that have died back to the roots and most people would probably pull them out and start over. But I just can't seem to do that. I have to water and care for a plant a year before I will pronounce them dead (Go ahead and laugh. All my friends do.) You know, a funny thing usually happens in the spring of the next year. Those same plants that have been pronounced "dead" the past summer, begin to come up from the roots and start to flourish. You see, they weren't dead after all; they just looked dead.
That's the way love is sometimes. It may look dead. It may look dead for a whole season. But we must be patient to wait for the life to come back. My spouse and I went through some terrible troubles for the first 13 years of our marriage. We both thought we had done irreparable damage to our love for one another. We'd both seen lawyers and were on the verge of calling it quits. But God just wouldn't let me do it. He kept telling me to wait (wait for it, wait for it). I waited through nine months of separation and then another six months while he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. I got TIRED of waiting. I wanted some closure and I wanted it NOW (remember, I told you patience was not one of my virtues).
However, I did wait and God did a miracle for us. He healed all the hurt, anger, and just general disgust in both are hearts and healed our marriage. He did what all the counseling couldn't do. He taught us to forgive. Granted, it took us 15 months to learn, but the important part is that we did learn and are still married today because we exercised patience.
So practice with me on being a little more patient today. It's hard. In fact, it's VERY hard. But the payoff is miraculous if we are only patient enough to "wait for it."
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
What is love?
When we think of love, most of us think of the passionate love that we see on televison, in the movies, or books. Did you know that outside of children's literature, the romance is the number one selling type of fiction? We are all looking for love but to quote a song, we're "looking for love in all the wrong places."
The Bible tells us what love is in I Corinthians 13: 4-8: "Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy;love does not parade itself, is nto puffed up; does not behave rudely, does nt seek its own; is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity (wrongdoing) but rejoices in the truth; bears all thing, believes all things, hopes all things,edures all things. Love never fails."
These are the things that make up love, not how good a person is in bed. After almost 32 years of marriage, I have discovered an amazing thing, WE'RE BOTH HUMAN and have human frailities and faults. In fact, my dream of the perfect marriage went up in smoke about 3 months after the wedding. That was the day of our first "fight". And you know what it was about? Vegetable soup!
You see, my parents are from Ohio so I learned how to cook like a "Yankee", a fact, I might add, that my spouse was unaware of. I had gotten a new crockpot as a wedding gift and decided to break it out of the box and use it. I carefully prepared what I thought was going to be a wonderful supper and waited for my beloved to come home.
When her got home, like all men, he asked, "What's for supper?" I told him that I had made vegetable soup. He opened the crockpot and cried, "That's not vegetable soup, that soupy beef stew! Here let me show you how to thicken it."
I was devastated. I told him that the beef stock, stew meat, barley, cabbage, etc. were in fact the ingredients to vegetable soup. He very authoritativly replied that vegetable soup was made in a tomato stock, with hamburger and okra, minus the cabbage.
To make a long story short, our regional differences (North vs. South) ended up with me in tears and Phil apologizing once he had tasted the "yankee" version of vegetable soup.
What has this got to do with love? Everything. That was not our first disagreement and yet, I know of couples who have divorced over less. It has nothing to do with mad passionate love, but with two people who are committed to work things out instead of insisting on their own way. Yes, I said that four letter word that lovers are so afraid of, "work".
Go back and reread I Corinthians 13: 4-8. There is not on word on passionate love, but there is a discussion on how we will know that we are truly loved. And all thoses characteristics take work. We have been working for years on our love and I can tell you that we haven't gotten it perfect yet and probably won't in this lifetime. But that's okay. There is coming a time when the two of us will love, not just one another, but also other people perfectly and THAT will be our "happily ever after."
The Bible tells us what love is in I Corinthians 13: 4-8: "Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy;love does not parade itself, is nto puffed up; does not behave rudely, does nt seek its own; is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity (wrongdoing) but rejoices in the truth; bears all thing, believes all things, hopes all things,edures all things. Love never fails."
These are the things that make up love, not how good a person is in bed. After almost 32 years of marriage, I have discovered an amazing thing, WE'RE BOTH HUMAN and have human frailities and faults. In fact, my dream of the perfect marriage went up in smoke about 3 months after the wedding. That was the day of our first "fight". And you know what it was about? Vegetable soup!
You see, my parents are from Ohio so I learned how to cook like a "Yankee", a fact, I might add, that my spouse was unaware of. I had gotten a new crockpot as a wedding gift and decided to break it out of the box and use it. I carefully prepared what I thought was going to be a wonderful supper and waited for my beloved to come home.
When her got home, like all men, he asked, "What's for supper?" I told him that I had made vegetable soup. He opened the crockpot and cried, "That's not vegetable soup, that soupy beef stew! Here let me show you how to thicken it."
I was devastated. I told him that the beef stock, stew meat, barley, cabbage, etc. were in fact the ingredients to vegetable soup. He very authoritativly replied that vegetable soup was made in a tomato stock, with hamburger and okra, minus the cabbage.
To make a long story short, our regional differences (North vs. South) ended up with me in tears and Phil apologizing once he had tasted the "yankee" version of vegetable soup.
What has this got to do with love? Everything. That was not our first disagreement and yet, I know of couples who have divorced over less. It has nothing to do with mad passionate love, but with two people who are committed to work things out instead of insisting on their own way. Yes, I said that four letter word that lovers are so afraid of, "work".
Go back and reread I Corinthians 13: 4-8. There is not on word on passionate love, but there is a discussion on how we will know that we are truly loved. And all thoses characteristics take work. We have been working for years on our love and I can tell you that we haven't gotten it perfect yet and probably won't in this lifetime. But that's okay. There is coming a time when the two of us will love, not just one another, but also other people perfectly and THAT will be our "happily ever after."
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