Love is Resiliant
Have you ever felt like you have too much going on? Have you ever felt like everything in your life keeps falling on your shoulders? It’s difficult to persevere under such a load. It’s for this reason that most people who are strong enough not to be crushed by the troubles of life will often point to something or someone. There’s always that something, and more often, it’s someone that keeps us going. The strength and bond of Love has one incorruptible attribute: Endurance.
When we love someone, we endure for them. The Apostle Paul says this about the resilience of Love.
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” 1 Corinthians 13:7
What does it mean to bear something? In our modern speaking we have several phrases or uses of the word. “Bear with me,” can mean “Allow me to finish this topic or activity.” Saying, “That’s too much to bear,” means “that’s beyond my ability to tolerate or handle.” In architecture and construction, a load-bearing wall is an integral part of the structure, and without it the roof or floor above would be too weak or unstable. Bearing in our modern English is an idea of endurance under pressure. However, the word we translate as bearing in modern English is a little Greek word pronounced “ste-go.”
Stego, written στέγω, is the word first-century Greeks would have associate with architecture as we do today for the word “bearing.” This association is so strong that the word for roof is from the same root, with only a single letter of difference. The word “στέγη,” (pronounced “ste-ge”) was understood to be the uppermost floor or deck on top of a dwelling place.
One of my favorite depictions of the parable of the ungrateful servant who owed much, has Jesus telling the story to Peter as they sat on the roof, or stege of a Judean home at night. A more vivid image of this for you might come from the story of the paralytic lowered through the roof (stege) of a home that Jesus was preaching in.
There is a powerful truth in this connection. Think friend. The roofs of Jesus’ time were not solid things like our modern asphalt shingled pitched roofs. Instead they were lattices of wood. Often, they were covered in many layers of reed mats or brush. While some well-off families could afford an additional permanent non-permeable layer, most homes were likely not solid structure. SO when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that love στέγω’s all things. This is not a bearing strengthened from rigidity but from flexibility and reiteration.
How much more should we then learn from this teaching to bear in love for others.?When we bear with our church family, or with our earth family, or our neighbors or the person that cut us off in traffic, or the politician we feel is destroying our country; we must bear with them in layered flexibility. In the cities of Japan and other nations or places with frequent earthquakes, the buildings are built to not be so rigid, but rather capable of flexing. As with the mighty trees, rigidity is not real strength, it is the ability to sway and yet stay rooted that true strength is magnified. So too must the Christian strengthen its bearing capacity for others.
Let me speak plainly. Many Christians today believe that the world is growing more wicked because of the rise in equal rights for LGBT+ people. Many point to the protection of abortion rights as the nation’s greatest evil. To you, I invite: bear all things. Love bears all things. Can you say you are love when you are not στέγω toward your neighbor—towards your enemy? If we cannot love and show that love unequivocally, are we truly His disciples?
Love is Resilient