Christmas is a good time to learn about love

I was re-reading the Bible's “love chapter” the other day. I looked it up because it's easy to let love slide and I wanted a refresher.

Firstly, I learned I can have major abilities—and make major sacrifices—but if there's no love in them then “it profits nothing.” I can speak the language of angels and articulate with silver-tongued human eloquence—but come out sounding like a “noisy gong or clanging cymbal.”

I can understand mysteries and be a literal know-it-all. I can have the sort of faith I only dream about—one that can “move mountains”—but without love “I am nothing.”

Even giving away all I own to uplift the lives of others, and going so far as to sacrifice my physical life, presumably for a passionate cause—is meaningless if I'm not motivated by love.

What does love look like then according to this writing? Love is patient and kind and not jealous. Impatience just pops up out of nowhere, it seems. Its nature is to act fast and think later. Happens to me every day in some form or another.

Kindness takes intention. Attention, too. I have to notice what it wants me to do, and I'm not always observant. Today I was. A friend is very isolated and alone partly due to the pandemic, and partly because she has no family near. She's asked people to call her—just to have that comforting interaction with another person. So I did.

Jealousy undercuts love. It's so self absorbed and full of wanting it can only pretend good will.

The love list gets more challenging. Love doesn't brag and isn't arrogant. No lording it over anyone.

It doesn't “insist on its own way.” Try this out on the 2-year-old self hiding somewhere in me.

Love doesn't hurt another and is not “easily provoked.” No deliberate destructive wounding. No put downs. No runaway rants.

Love does not “take into account a wrong suffered.” Name the person who doesn't remember who did what. It's how the what is filed that makes the difference. Is it active or inactive?

Love takes on distinct personality in this chapter. It “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Love does not run out, does not fail, does not end.

When it comes to such bold vision of love am I a person who knows how to love — and do I actually live it? Yes, no, and sometimes. I long for a better record.

Lest it seem unattainable there is a wonderful passage farther along in the Bible that reads, “Let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” This is how I learn to love — how I desire to be loving. Such a sweeping endeavor comes from God. Born of Him in me.

And Christmas is a very good time to think about that.