This week my assignment is to pray for the grace of Patience. With this, we're going to begin praying through 1 Corinthians 13. If you're familiar with this chapter on Love, you can understand where this is going. Note, the fourth verse, the beginning of the description of Love:
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud."
Personally, I've spent some time with this passage previously. As any good Christian Home-school kid does, I even memorized this Chapter. It's nice to go back to it after a few years and read it again. I really enjoy the first three verses:
"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing."
This is so central to what I believe Christianity is really about. People so often get hung up on doing Christian things, attending church, joining Bible studies, volunteering, praying for others, giving money to charity, but at the heart of all those actions, there must be Love. Without love, all those things are meaningless. No matter how extreme your actions may be, without Love, they lead to nothing.
When our pastor asked me what I thought we should pray for this week, I commented that sometimes (usually) I am sarcastic with Jim and it becomes unkind. It's for the sake of being funny, but I think it just comes out mean-spirited. So instead of just praying about being sarcastic, we decided to start praying about Love. I'm excited to see where this takes us.
In marriage, I think so many people have a romantic idea of always being "in-love" with someone. When they no longer feel it, it's just as easy to split up. But actually loving someone is quite different. It's about being patient, being kind, being content, being humble toward/with someone. Making a commitment to love someone is much deeper than we first think, and it's not to be taken lightly.
It's interesting, when our relationship first started to get serious, I was having doubts about our ability to love each other. I remember praying, even then, that God would give Jim an opportunity to read and learn 1 Corinthians 13. I wanted us to have a shared understanding of what Love is. So there's an answered prayer already.
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Update from last week: Praying for Chastity was very effective, and reading about Faith was even more effective. One interesting note about this experiment is that after I've prayed about something for a week, I'm supposed to drop it, move on, and trust that God heard my prayer and have faith that he is in control of it. So this week, I'm moving past praying about Chastity and just keep practicing it. I think that prayer has been answered already - it's getting easier everyday.
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