It’s a well-established fact in my family that whenever a family photo day comes around, I am guaranteed to be exceedingly grumpy. It’s not because I don’t like family photos, or want to ruin the day or anything like that, it’s just somehow happened that way every time. It’s just a subconscious thing – and I can trace it back to a specific event from my childhood.

I was five, and I was grumpy that day that we were going to have the family photos taken. But on this particular day, Dad managed to cheer me up enough to get me to the place, by saying that there was going to be a clown there. I love clowns! It was going to be great!

…there was no clown there.

We had our photo taken, and I smiled and what have you, but as soon as we were out of that place I took up the issue with my father. He’d said there would be a clown there, and there was no clown! His reply? “Yeah, the clown was there, but you didn’t see him because you were too grumpy”.

What kind of an answer is that?!? Now, granted, that was seventeen years ago, and my memories of that period of my life may have become slightly twisted with age (but I’m still positive that we had that pet cockatoo that Mum and Dad deny!). But even so, it’s put a subconscious hatred for family photo days into my life that has extended until today, and I’m sure that there’s some sort of psycho-babble out there that can prove it.

Today, however, we read that love is not resentful – or, in the NIV, that it “keeps no record of wrongs”.

So today, Dad, if you’re reading this, I forgive you. I will never again be resentful of that non-existant clown that only appears for happy children, and I will be happy for family photo days from now on.

Boy, if that declaration doesn’t show love, then I don’t know what does!

I’m a pretty laid back person. This probably doesn’t come as any great surprise to anyone reading this who actually knows me. If you’re reading this from another country, you may have simply put that down to my Aussie-ness, but the reality is that even by Australian standards, I’m very laid back. On the whole, I consider this to be a pretty good thing, so long as it doesn’t let me fall into apathy or mediocrity (as has happened on far too many occasions for my liking). It’s because of this that I initially considered this eighth quality of love to be pretty easy for me – surely it’s simple to not be irritable (or “easily angered” as the NIV puts it) if you’re nonplussed by pretty much everything?

Then something strange dawned on me. My shoulder and upper body muscles over the past few days have been incredibly tense – so much so that it would hurt to apply any pressure to them. Then I realised that I hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep for over a week. I recognised these symptoms on a theoretical basis, but never from personal experience…

My body was telling me that I was stressed.

It took me as a massive surprise, because I don’t DO stressed. Mentally and emotionally and spiritually, I felt completely fine – but physically, I was stressed. How on earth does that even work? How can my mind be telling me that I’m relaxed, and my body tell me that I’m stressed? Obviously one of them is lying!

And the odds are, it’s my mind that’s doing the lying. Because as I reflected on this quality – of love not being irritable – I realised that although right now I was at peace with everything (even if I may have just been kidding myself about it), it really wouldn’t take all that much for me to become irritated when I didn’t get my own way with something. It harkens back to that patience quality from day one – while everything’s going fine, it’s easy to be patient.

I don’t think my laid-backness or my relaxedness is a facade – I really am a very casual person. Yet as I reflected on this whole experience (which really is a new one to me), I realised that the reasons I was becoming physically stressed over are really inconsequential in the long run. The reason I was bothered by them in the first place was because they’re not things I need to be worried about, yet I am. They’re not things I should even by FOCUSING on, yet I am. And as a result, when they don’t go the right way for me, it’s so, so easy to become irritated or angry over it.

After much praying and soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that I needed some serious reevaluation about what’s important, and what I should be focusing on. The dumb thing about it is that I’ve done that exact thing countless times before, and I keep coming back to the same answer; yet I continually get distracted by unimportant stuff, that leads to my being impatient and irritable.

What is that thing?

Well, I mentioned a few days ago that I’ve been snapped by Colossians 3:12 – “Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience”. I see a whole stack of similarities between “Not irritable”, “Not easily angered” and “Meekness”.

And to see what it means, we need to once again look to the life of Christ. Christ epitomised meekness, yet He also got angry. Really angry. Make-a-whip-and-hit-stuff type angry. So what was it in Christ that made him meek, not irritable, and not easily angered? How do we define these qualities as they relate to Christ?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s all about the Gospel. It’s all about the good news that although we’re sinners and have rejected God, He loved us enough to send His son to die in our place. Christ was all about that message!

This meant that when people would come to Him wanting to argue their own points of view or how much he was doing wrong, He didn’t get irritated or angry. Instead, he showed us how to be meek – completely nonplussed by what they were saying. He just let it all slide.

But when people distorted the Gospel message, well then He let it rip. His life had a single focus, and that was the good news. If something was important to that message, it was important to Him. If it wasn’t important to that message, then it wasn’t important to Him.

It’s exactly the same in my life. I find that when I’m wholly focused on Christ and who He is and what He’s done, then I’m far less irritable, and far less easily angered – because everything else just isn’t that important. But when I lose that focus, then everything starts to change. That loss of focus is something that had been happening to me recently.

To be honest, I’m really thankful to God that He’s given me physical indicators of stress. If my body hadn’t started yelling at me, then I have no idea when my mind would have finally realised just how off-topic I’d become. By the time my mind picked up on it, there would be countless opportunities missed, and I’d be so obsessed by unimportant stuff that it’d be even more difficult to get back on track.

So my question to you – what’s your focus? What makes you irritable or angry? Is it God-glorifying?

This one has taken a while to come, for two main reasons. 50% of the reason is because it’s taken me a long time to get my head around it – it’s not as easy as some of the others have been and it’s taken me a while to try to get a handle on it! The other 50% is slackness in not writing… but thankfully, we haven’t found a “Love is not slack” verse yet, so I’m off the hook there!

Love does not insist on its own way. That’s the ESV translation – the NIV says that “love is not self-seeking”. Either way, it’s a call to selflessness, which is something that I’ve always seen as being the highest form of love.

But that makes it difficult, because you have to ask yourself the question – can we ever do anything that is truly selfless? Even while loving others “selflessly”, there’s still an element in me that wants to do this because I get a kick out of doing the right thing, to put it completely bluntly. Even when loving someone gets no other reward apart from that, it’s still somewhat self-seeking it would seem.

You know what though? You can take that train of thought until the cows come home, but I’m not sure it’s the best description of selfless love. Because something I’ve realised while meditating on this verse is that if that’s my description of selfless love, then Jesus didn’t love selflessly. Have a read of this well-known passage:

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)

I’ve heard that passage plenty of times, and it’s a good one because it rightfully reminds us to base everything that we do on what Christ has already done for us. That our motivation for doing anything is based on Christ’s love for us.

But take a look at how it describes why Christ died on the cross for us – for the joy that was set before him. If we take a stance that to love selflessly, we must be completely non-plussed by any potential outcomes for us, then Christ didn’t do that. The reason He died for us, the reason He showed His love in that way, was for the joy that was set before Him!

As I reflect on that, and realise that I’m supposed to be imitating Christ’s love through all of this, the whole selfless love thing starts to come a little more into focus. Christ was not self-seeking in His death for us. We see in the garden of Gethsemane that He would have much preferred not to go through with it – but He didn’t insist on His own way. Rather, He insisted on God’s way, because that’s what brought Him the most joy.

It’s the same for us. If we’re to truly encounter joy, then we can’t insist on our own way. We need to insist on God’s way. If we’re to love God, we can’t insist on our own way – we need to insist on His way.

And that takes itself into everything. As I reflected on this verse, I was plagued with the question, “But what about when people are making the wrong decision? Am I supposed to be selfless and let them just make the mistakes?” That would be a fair assumption to make, if we translate “not insisting on our own way” to mean “letting them have their way”. But that’s not what it’s about at all.

If I’m to truly love another person, I need to insist on God’s way. Instead of being self-serving, I need to be God-serving. That’s how Christ loved me, and that’s how I need to love others.

To be honest with you, I don’t have anything much to reflect on this one. It’s pretty self-explanatory, and not all that hard to do. I suppose I could delve into what constitutes rudeness or something like that, but it seems as though it would be a pointless exercise because we all know what rudeness looks like.

Love isn’t rude. Sometimes stuff really is that simple.