Love is Patient, Love is Kind.

Age of Beauty
Originally uploaded by [wilson_fotography]

I am far too exhausted to do any commentary on this entry,
though something my mom use to tell us did cross my mind,
“Use the sense God gave you and you’ll find it.”
She was usually referring to shoes. I am referring to a commentary.

I recalled these words earlier today as I was waiting to hear from my brother.
My sibs and I weren't sure where my 81 year old mother had gotten too.
An initial alarm raised by my sister up in Wisconsin, led to me calling my brother here in town.
No phone contact (land line or cell), no email, no neighbor to check with, and worst of all no house key to go and look in her garage. Where was the car?
Finally dawned on me, “Go look through the windows, you could see a body.”
So obvious (after all, that’s how they'd found her mother)
and yet it took us way too long to come up with the idea.

Well, Mom turned up four hours later.
Singing in her email to grandson Augie, “Oh where oh where has your Grandmother gone? Oh where oh where can she be?”
And quite pleased with a $25 gift certificate she’d won at some party she’d left the house early, early this morning to attend. (Which is why my sister had missed her.)

So, I am passing on this Bible passage.
It came to me in a very different context yesterday.
But it fits so well with today’s events.

I am amazed at the depth of emotion those Four Hours of Not Knowing generated.
I am left emptied and exhausted.
And I find these words quite comforting.

1 If I speak in human or angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body [to hardship] that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians