Love is Patient (with interruptions)

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Challenge: Reflect on how you respond when your spouse or your kids interrupt you. How can you exercise patience with your loved ones this week (even as God has been patient with you)?

Last night, I was watching a film with my family, and I had two kids who kept blocking the screen, and I had another one that kept interrupting me with information about stuff that had nothing to do with the film. And I’m thinking, “Man, this is frustrating.”

And I eventually got thinking, “Okay, I’m probably not responding very well in this situation because I’m not being very patient with these interruptions.” It got me thinking about patience.

I remember my mom once told me that she always felt second-best to whatever my dad was watching on the TV screen. He’d always shush her and tell her to wait until the commercial. This was back before DVRs and you could actually stop what you were watching. But, he always made her feel second-best to what he was watching.

We have these vows we confess when we get married. We’re going to love and cherish our wives. And then, we get into the hustle and bustle of life, and and it’s really easy to lose sight of that.

You know, there’s this passage that also gets quoted at weddings a lot. It talks about: love is patient, love is kind, so on and so forth. But, you know, love is patient.

It takes patience to handle interruptions. C.S. Lewis once said, “Whoever you are in an interruption, that’s who you really are.”

I think if we’re really going to model the character of Christ to our children and our wives and our families, we have to develop the habit of being quick to hear, slow to speak. slow to anger. And start with showing some patience to the people in our own family.

I think it’s easier to be patient with co-workers and other people that you meet out there more than it is to be patient with our own spouses and our children at home, because we’re letting our guard down and we’re trying to relax after work or relax after the day. I think it’s really honoring to God if we can be display the character of Christ at home as well.

So, I really want us to think about how God has been patient with us in each of our own walks with him and our own individual processes. How has God been patient with us?

And let that revelation shape our responses this week, not just to the people outside the home, but starting first and foremost with those people who are closest to us and who are in our very home.