Love endures

bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. – 1 Corinthians 13.7

If I were to try to come up with a recipe for marriage it might sound something like this:

Love bears with everything

Love doesn't doubt

Love gives hope

Love just endures

Love bears with everything. We all have our quirks. We all have those little strangenesses that make us unique. There are things about all of us that are irritating. There are little things about us that make us difficult to love. We all have things that are hard to endure.

So how do we deal with those things? Love bears with the toilet seat being up or down. Loves bears with toilet roll being on the wrong way. Love bears with bad moods. Love bears with grumpiness. Loves bear with tiredness. Loves bears with unlovable friends. Love bears with peculiar habits. Love bear with quirks.

Love believes all things. Love doesn't doubt. Love believes unquestionably.

But doesn’t that put me at risk. If I believe and don’t doubt doesn’t that put me at risk. Couldn’t I be taken advantage of? Well, yeah, it does – but love would rather believe and be wrong than doubt and be wrong.

Love hopes. When everything else is going wrong love keeps giving hope. Love says ‘we’re down, we don’t have much, things don’t look so hot – but we have each other and we have the Lord so we have hope.’

Love endures all things. Love just sticks. Enduring may not have the most romantic sound but love is more than romance. Love does endure. It remains, it bears up, it undergoes pressures, sometimes it struggles.

But it endures. It stays. Infatuations come and go. Romance draws us to each other and keep the emotions alive. But it is love that endures.

But this isn’t just about marriage. It is for friendships and fellowships and it is for the body of Christ.

I have attached a photo that popped up on Facebook while I was working on this. It is a photo of our daughter Beth and her friend Stacie. It was taken about 1986. Today they are still the best of friends and now they are living close to each other again. How does that happen? It happens because true love endures, and not only for married couples. It endures for all who choose to love each other.