I had to speak #the other week on the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13: ‘love is patient, love is kind.’ I did think that, though Paul then goes off on a bender of ethical description that gets poetic and astonishing in its simplicty and range (love always hopes, always perseveres), you could almost stop just at those two phrases: love is patient, love is kind.
Kindness is hard to argue against in any ethical system, perhaps, but patience, I think, has to have a reason. A motto of Silicon Valley is ‘move fast and break things’. Revolutions, it can be argued, are all about timing, seizing the moment. But love is patient. Why? Isn’t there a lot to be angry and impatient about?
I think it only works because ours is not the main hand on the steering wheel. God is taking the universe somewhere, somewhere good. And a patient life is a long meditation on the goodness of God.