My daughter Maggie gave me a coffee mug for Christmas. On it is a quote: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”
I treasure 1 Corinthians 13, but after one particularly bumpy parenting day I looked at the coffee mug and grimaced. It’s kind of scary to think that my child’s understanding of love is viewed through the lens of my flaws. There are times when I definitely fail. There are problems I’m not so good at enduring, and ones I don’t want to bear. I hope for all kinds of things that are less than worthy or holy.
Fortunately, my daughter seems able to recognize that I love her, even though my love is watered down and polluted by my weaknesses. She loves me back—imperfectly—and I love her for that, and somehow we have a cycle going that is a feeble but real imitation of something far greater.
I look at the verse on my coffee mug and note that I can either despair over how little my love resembles God’s, or rejoice that I “know in part” what love is. How I look at it is up to me. Is my heart half empty, or half full? And more importantly, which way of thinking about it is more likely to draw me closer to God?
