Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, May 17, 2020
by Dr. Kimberly Leetch, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Where everything else fades, love endures.
For some reason, people have a strange tendency to accumulate things that do not last. Paul knew it. He lived and traveled in a world brimming with trade, an exchange of ideas, power, politics, art and culture. Before his conversion, Paul had many of these things, but his heart was filled with hate. After coming to know and follow Jesus, Paul learned to love. He could see in a radical and immediate way that the things he strived for paled compared to the gift of love.
Even today, it is tempting to strive for things that fail to satisfy; things that are temporary or breakable. We live in a culture that also values trade, information, and things we can accumulate. Unfortunately, none of those endure. The things we collect break. Our system of free trade is often precarious. And the things we learn slowly fall out of our heads as we age.
Years ago I had the opportunity to do CPE (intern) in an Alzheimer wing of a nursing home. I wrestled with the entire experience. Being at the front end of my life, building my value as a human being with education and knowledge, it was hard to wrap my head around losing one’s self by losing one’s memories. I asked a lot of difficult questions. When a person dies, will they enter heaven as their younger, knowledgeable selves or their older, lost selves? At what point in their life will their consciousness endure in heaven?
These questions haunted me. But they were making a wrong assumption about the value of a person. I was too concerned with a person’s knowledge, which fades like our collectibles. What doesn’t fade is love.
The people I worked with all had one thing in common— they were all loved; if not by family, then by their caregivers or communities. Not one lived unloved. In that facility, Paul’s words came alive. “Love is patient; love is kind... it is not irritable or resentful.” Residents who were as vulnerable as the ones I worked with were particularly in need of Paul’s definition of love.
It seems the selves that will endure for eternity are not the ones that remember, but the selves that were loved.
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