Love suffers willingly, without counting the cost. Love doesn’t care who gets the credit. Love doesn’t justify self or put others down in order to feel more important. Love doesn’t get a secret thrill when others are proven wrong, but is overjoyed when they are honored. Love practices possibility thinking, sees others for their potential, and believes against the odds.
Love won’t quit. But where there are leaders and teachers, they will be retired; where there are ministries, their day will end. It is love that we will remember. It is love that will stay with us. Our understanding is shaky and imperfect at best, but love is always perfectly clear.
God calls us to exercise faith and hope. But the most important calling of all is to love.
This message is adapted from “The Gift of Love: 1 Corithians 13 Revisited” written by Marianne Jones in the April 2004 issue of Lutheran Woman Today (now Gather magazine).