Kindness

“Love is patient, love is kind…”
1 Co 13:4

Love is to be enjoyed, not to be endured; yet it’s hard for us to appreciate the pleasure of love if we have to suffer through it all. Patience and kindness don’t usually go hand in hand. Love suffers long, but not usually with kindness.

Out of our commitment to God and faithfulness to our marriage vows, we may remain in the marriage with our countenance downcast and temper short. We may suffer long within the relationship, but our kindness toward our partner may be in short supply.

Love is patient, love is kind…”

Kindness is what makes love sufferable; and love is what makes kindness possible. These two must complement each other to make a love relationship enjoyable. When the feeling of love is absent, kindness must be present to make the love relationship long lasting. When youthful passion is strong, lovers can treat each other passionately; when it is not, at least they can deal with each other kindly and thoughtfully. Powerful emotion isn’t self-sustaining and it must come down from the peak; kindness is something that keeps the flame of love burning in the valley.

Lovers should be friends also, and friends tend to treat one another with kindness.

“Husband and wife in youth, companions in old age (少年夫妻老來伴,)” goes a Chinese saying. When the flame of passionate love dies down, friendship between husband and wife is the oil that keeps the fire of love smoldering. By this time love is less of the body and more of the soul, less of the physical and more of the spiritual.

A little bit of kindness goes a long way in a love relationship.

We may think courtesy and respect are no longer needed within a marriage relationship, since physical and emotional barriers between the two have been swept away by romantic love and the couple are encircled or entrapped by a ring. The key to a happy marriage, which I have heard often among Chinese people, is for couples to respect each other as if they were guests (相敬如賓.) Don’t we Chinese people always shower our guests with great kindness and esteem no matter who they are? I believe our marriages will become much more tolerable and enjoyable if couples learn to treat each other that way. It seems reasonable that we should treat our lovers with even greater respect than we show toward our guests, doesn’t it?

I believe Paul placed the attribute of kindness behind patience strategically in his discourse on the essence of love, for one can hardly love rightly apart from both of them. May we never forget to always show kindness to our loved ones to make them feel comfortable and secure within a loving relationship.