As I was washing the dishes today, thinking about a friend of mine and how quickly I get angered because he continually doesn’t listen to the wisdom I know to be true, I got a new perspective on love. 

This friend of mine keeps running back to the same old thing that he has always known as comfort. He builds his entire reality on it. It is quite destructive actually. I know this because I used to do the same; his story is my story. So when he tells me new information on the situation, I get frustrated. I’m not frustrated because he doesn’t listen to me, rather, I am frustrated because I know he is going to crash and burn. I am frustrated because he won’t listen and due to that he is going to experience pain. I haven’t been patient or kind with this area of my friend’s struggle. Mostly because I love him so much that I don’t want to have to wait for him to be broken before he turns around.

That’s when it hit me. Love is patient. Love is kind. 

I began to see just how difficult it is to be patient as you sit and watch your friend ignore your warnings and fly down the road, headed straight for the edge of the Grand Canyon. I began to understand how hard it is to be kind, when kindness just doesn’t seem to get the point across that he is heading for a catastrophe. All I want to do is shout at him how ignorant he is being, how his process is flawed, and how he needs to change his ways so that he doesn’t go down in flames. I love him too much to see him hurt. Especially if I know he can avoid it. 

But God doesn’t work that way. As we barrel down the road on our own collision courses with our own obstacles, God doesn’t shout at us as we mess up. He doesn’t use cruelty to teach us a lesson. Instead He walks with us. He bears down and feels the pain we feel. He holds us in our childishness, occasionally slapping our hand away from the burning stove but never cutting the hand off. 

Being patient and kind is not always just about me. It’s not always about having patience in my process, or being kind to random people in the store. It also has that deeper, more difficult part. That part that places you in the passenger seat of your friends car and tells you “be an influence, but don’t take control of the steering wheel.” And that sucks, because you can look down the road and see where the car is heading, but somehow your friend driving the car is blind to it. 

It is love that truly allows us to not project our process onto the process of those we care about. Yet it is the people we care about who’s processes are entangled within our own. Thus we have the difficulty of relationship.