It seems appropriate that we are studying from the well-known “love chapter” this week, that on Valentine’s Day I am reading “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7).  Yesterday we had lunch with a couple who were celebrating their 58th wedding anniversary, and we saw this enduring kind of love: his bouquet of flowers on the table, her slicing the chicken and heaping the salads, passing bread, and sharing of words and laughter over strong coffee in tall mugs, deep red on the inside.  It was rich, their life together– and if you knew their story of regrets and celebrations, even richer.

Will we make it to 58 years?  I can’t really picture that at all, but looking at them I can see how it comes slowly, one year after another piling up… and both of them enduring, bearing life and one another, and still believing in what they are growing.  Paul’s Love Chapter provides the road map.  Love is patient, love is kind…in all those days that never go the way you expect them to.  Love… does not envy or boast… because this relationship is what we have been given and what we do with it will have eternal repercussions.  Love… does not insist on its own way…laying down our lives over and over as we imitate the Beloved One who laid down His life for us.

I forget sometimes that love doesn’t come naturally, the way media tells us it will.  To hear them tell the story, it is a helpless landslide that should take us by surprise and keep us breathless and celebrating.  The way Paul tells the story, it is a daily choice to seek something that matters most of all, a daily bending of my will to obey my Father, a constant transformation of my shallow desires and emotions into the likeness of Jesus’ roaring ocean depth of love.  It may take me 58 years… and more… to figure that out.