~Endure    Greek: ὑπομένω – to remain i.e. abide, not recede or flee Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good and his loyal love endures. ~ 1 Chronicles 16:34 ~ Resiliency, sustaining, holding fast… I was thinking, you can endure and be very bearish about it, or you can endure with patience. I suppose most of us endure with a mixed bag of emotions… some days better than others. And I suppose there are days when we simply do not endure. We cease “to remain.” It may be that on those days, God sends a fellow sojourner to be that tangible source of endurance for us, until we…

You come along side someone in their storm, (bear all things). You help anchor them to the truth, (believe all things). Now it is possible to express love by hoping all things. Hope ~ Hebrew: בָּטַח – state of confidence, security Greek: ἐλπίς  – to wait for salvation with joy and full confidence If you are safely in a boat calling to a man overboard, you do not tell him it’s going to be alright when he is in fact drowning. But it would be kind indeed to offer that truth once he has a good hold of a life-preserver ring. It takes a moment or two to orient after having taken hold,…

The final three traits in The Impossible Love List are bound together in a very beautiful way. Their relationship to one another begins on the bedrock of belief. “I believe, help my unbelief!” ~ Mark 9:24 ~ I look at the phrase, Love Believes All Things and the first thing I ask myself is, “What do I believe, and how could that be a demonstration of love?” And I wonder, is the accuracy of my beliefs connected to the success of that demonstration? In other words, if my beliefs are unsound, if I believe things that are untrue, will that hamper or prevent me from showing love by believing all things?…

Exhale……the home stretch of this journey reveals 4 beautiful descriptions of what love is. I pray we will now look ahead for opportunities to demonstrate these miraculous qualities of love. We’ve saturated ourselves of late in eight anti-love traits. This trait and those that will follow, simply and obviously state love’s true nature. If you are resolved to the fact that love is an utterly selfless act, you’ll concede that regardless of what might transpire in the lives of your primary people, you are prepared to bear it with them. When you do, you love. There is nothing more stunning, more wonderfully disorienting than having someone stand with you when you are in…

Anti-love is at its core egocentric……. Me pursuing MY agenda. Regardless of how anti-love expresses, the undercurrent is driven by self. Love, as expressed in 1 Corinthians 13, is at its core self-less. In fact, self has absolutely nothing to do with the administering of agape love. Nothing. People who are connected to the Living God love, because God is love. When we love, we are foremost exposing people to love’s Creator rather than to arguably, His greatest characteristic. Find God and you find love along with a treasure load of other eternally valuable things, but make so mistake, God is the end all. I bowed my head and worshiped the…

All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes but the LORD weighs the spirit. ~ Proverbs 16:2 ~ Above all the other traits (she said naively), I approach this trait with fear and trembling. I believe that at the core of nearly every deep work, is a crossroads marked “MY WAY vs. GODS”. I truly do. I believe the deepest layer of any struggle between growth and regression is about trust, or lack of it. I stand at a balance-scale and put my plan on one side, measuring it against my level of trust in God. I don’t know God’s plan (as far as the heavens…

Only within the Triune God does love exist flawlessly. It’s merited there. Father, Son and Spirit demonstrate all of loves characteristics, all the time. And… God loves humanity. It’s always unmerited. It’s always unearned. It’s never reciprocated adequately yet that does not diminish its flow. God is always offering perfect love to flawed people. Always. Even in Heaven, He will be the reason we are able to love. Unlike now, He will have access to the whole of our beings without any encumbrances or barriers. No blockage. No baggage. No resistance. Pure love will flow in me and through me. Equally miraculous, I will be free to receive love fully. These days, I…

Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts, those who say, “With our tongue we will prevail, our lips are with us; who is master over us?” ~Psalm 12:2-4~ Boast – to speak with exaggeration and excessive pride, especially about oneself. It strikes me… these anti-love traits are doing more than just defining bad character. They are saying, “Envious people are not loving people. Boastful people are not loving people.” I’ve missed that glaring point till now. But there in the text of 1 Corinthians 13 are eight anti-love…

I’m wary as I consider writing about each description found in The Impossible Love List. I had no intention of doing so and still have one foot out…but I feel a familiar tug to explore here. So, I’m looking at the list of 15 characteristics, plus a powerful punch line. Seven words describe what love is. Eight describe what it is not. For the first time I stop to think about why more than half the list tells me what love isn’t. God could have revealed the positive attributes and left me to recognize that anything contrary would be love’s antithesis. But already I see how vital it is that I…

I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws,  and I bent down to them and fed them. ~Hosea 11:4~ I ponder the list of love traits found in 1 Corinthians 13, wondering if it might be offered because God asks broken humans to seek out relationship with other broken humans. If it were easy to interrelate with another person would God have needed to be so thorough in articulating the characteristics of Godly loving? Apparently loving successfully, in God’s economy, means we are going to have to do things and behave in ways…

patience – μακροθυμέω mak-roth-oo-meh’-o; to be long-spirited JKV = suffereth long Be patient? Ugh. Some people try my patience more than others. What does that mean? Right here at the top of the list the Apostle Paul generated for me, is a trait that exposes my heart for the temperamental, selfish thing it is. To offer patience is to practice Agape, which I am commanded by Jesus to give. I am to respond to people and situations as one who “suffereth long.” I am to be, as the Greek defines it, a woman who is “long-spirited.” I am to respond to an irritant with patience whether it’s the first or thousandth time I’ve encountered…