Daily Devotional
- Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:7 – It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
- Reflection: We make promises to each other. We make vows and covenants. They are based in trust, love, and commitment. They take the long view and involve working through lows and highs, finding perspective, making compromise, choosing intimacy on many levels from psychological and emotional to physical, and choosing each other while sharing the mundane and daily interactions that become the shared language and experience of love. Long-term promises involve commitment and conflict resolution.
- Spiritual Practice Prompt: Write a letter articulating your commitment to someone you love and what they mean to you.
SONG
- I Won’t Give Up by Jason Mraz: https://youtu.be/O1-4u9W-bns?si=wRn5oEMnuWsoshkO
Love as an action is the only thing that has ever changed the world for the better. Love is Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi…. Love is a little girl in Pakistan named Malala Yousafzai standing up to armed men who said that girls shouldn’t be educated….
Love is a firefighter running into a burning building, risking his or her life for people he or she doesn’t even know. Love is that first responder hurtling toward an emergency, a catastrophe, a disaster. Love is someone protesting anything that hurts or harms the children of God. Jesus said it this way, hours before his crucifixion: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s own life for one’s friends” [John 15:13].
Love is a commitment to seek the good and to work for the good and welfare of others. It doesn’t stop at our front door or our neighborhood, our religion or race, or our state’s or your country’s border. This is one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth, as the hymn goes….
Where selfishness excludes, love makes room and includes. Where selfishness puts down, love lifts up. Where selfishness hurts and harms, love helps and heals. Where selfishness enslaves, love sets free and liberates.
The way of love will show us the right thing to do, every single time. It is moral and spiritual grounding—and a place of rest—amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times. Loving is not always easy, but like with muscles, we get stronger both with repetition and as the burden gets heavier. And it works. — Michael Curry