You Don't Have to Love Like Everyone Else

     Every church has someone people think of as the loving one. She remembers everyone's name and their hard week, drops everything to sit with the grieving, and seems to have more patience than the rest of us put together. We admire her, and then we measure ourselves against her, and we come up short. So we decide we are not very loving, or at least not in the way that counts. That verdict has sent a lot of good people into a low, tired guilt, working hard to become someone they were never made to be.
     First Corinthians 13 is often read at weddings, which is understandable, because the words are beautiful. But that setting hides what Paul is actually doing. He wrote this chapter in the middle of a long argument about spiritual gifts. The church in Corinth had plenty of gifts and had turned them into a competition. Some gifts looked impressive, others looked ordinary, and people were ranking themselves accordingly. Paul interrupts all of it with love. He is not changing the subject to romance. He is telling a gifted, striving, comparison-weary church what their gifts were for in the first place.
     Paul opens this chapter explaining the severity of living without love. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. He keeps raising the stakes, all the way to giving away everything he owns and handing over his body, and still the verdict holds. Without love, I gain nothing. Notice what he is doing to the gifts. He is not lowering their value. He is showing that their value was never in themselves. A gift is an instrument, and an instrument is worth something only for what it serves. The Corinthians had fallen in love with the instrument. Paul points them back to the music it was meant to make.
     He then describes love, and he describes it almost entirely with verbs. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. He does not hand us a single scene and say, copy this. He gives us a character, a way of being toward other people, and that character can wear a hundred different faces. The point is not that love always looks the same. The point is what love is like underneath, whatever it happens to be doing on the surface.
     This is where the guilt starts to lift, if we let it. Love is not a uniform we all have to squeeze into. It is a character God is forming in us, and He expresses that one character through very different people. The person who cooks and the person who counsels, the one who organizes quietly and the one who prays out loud, the one who fixes what is broken and the one who notices who is missing, all of them can be doing the same thing. They can all be loving. Their gifts differ, but the love running through the gifts is one love, and it comes from one source. God is love. He does not fit inside a single label, and neither does the way His love reaches us. When you serve out of the particular gift He actually gave you, rather than the gift you wish you had or the gift you admire in someone else, you are not offering a lesser love. You are offering His love in the shape He designed for you to carry it.
     It helps to see how ordinary this is. Think of the last time someone met a need of yours in a way you would never have thought of. Maybe you were overwhelmed and someone simply took a task off your plate without being asked. Maybe you were sitting in something heavy and someone said nothing at all, only stayed. You did not walk away thinking they had performed love correctly. You walked away feeling loved. The gift fit the moment because it came out of who that person actually is, and God used it. That is the whole pattern of the chapter in miniature. He forms one love and lets it out through many different hands, and each hand carries it a little differently.
     You were never called to become the model Christian in your head. You were called to love, and the love was always meant to travel through you, not through a copy of someone else. The comparison that wears us down turns out to be beside the point. Envy of another person's gift is really a distrust of the God who assigned the gifts. He arranged the body on purpose, and He arranged you into it on purpose, and He intends to display something of Himself through the exact combination of grace and limitation that is your life.
     Paul has one more turn to make. Love never ends, he writes, but the gifts do. Prophecies will pass away. Tongues will cease. Knowledge will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. The gifts belong to this in-between age. They are real, and they are good, and they are temporary, because they are meant for a world that is still on its way home. Love is different. Love carries straight through into the world to come. It is the one thing that does not expire.
     And that means something about the love we know now. We only know it in part. Paul reaches for an image his readers would have understood at once, because Corinth was known for making mirrors. For now we see in a mirror dimly, he says, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. A first-century mirror gave you a true reflection and a blurry one at the same time. That is where we live. When you are loved well by someone in this church, when a gift meets you at the moment you needed it, you are seeing something real. You are also seeing it dimly. You are catching a genuine glimpse of a love whose full brightness you have not met yet.
     I find that changes how I receive love from people who are nothing like me. When someone loves me through a gift I do not have and would not have thought to use, I used to file it away as their thing, a style that was not mine. Now I think it is closer to the truth to say that God was showing me a side of His love I could not have seen on my own. Every gift in the room is another angle on the same face. No one of us sees the whole thing. Together, over years, through patience and kindness and all the plain unglamorous verbs of chapter 13, we are slowly seeing more of it. The full sight is still ahead. But the fragments are honest, and they are His.
     So faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love. Faith will one day become sight. Hope will become possession. Love simply keeps going, because love is what God is, and God does not end. That is why it is the greatest gift. Not because it is the most impressive to watch, but because it is the only one that lasts, and the only one that was ever the point.
     If you have been tired of trying to love the way you think you are supposed to, hear the relief in this. You do not have to become someone else. Bring the gift He gave you, and let the love move through it. Receive the love that comes to you in shapes you would never have chosen, and thank Him for the wider picture. What you are holding now is real, even though you see it dimly. One day you will see it whole. Until then, love in the shape He gave you, and trust that the greatest gift is the one already at work between you.