I Love Them And They Are Not A Joy

Somebody at church said their daughter is a joy.

They meant it. It was not a performance and there was nothing smug about it. She is a joy, and they said it the way people say the weather is nice.

And you drove home doing an inventory, and the word joy would not attach to the child you were thinking about, and neither would delight, and neither would easy.

Love attaches. Love attaches immediately and completely and there has never been a moment of doubt about it.

But joy is a different word and it will not go on, and you have been trying to put it on for about six years, and every failure to make it fit has gone into a private column marked evidence.

I am not going to tell you to change your attitude. That is a technique and this is not a place that hands those out, and gratitude cannot be produced on instruction.

And I am not going to tell you your child is a joy. I have not met them, and a stranger telling you what to feel about your own child would be worth nothing.

Beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth

There is a verse in 1 Corinthians 13 that everybody hears at weddings, and the four verbs at the end of it are not wedding words at all.

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. (1 Corinthians 13:7, King James Version)

Beareth. Endureth. Those are load words. They describe carrying something over a distance, and nothing carried over a distance is described as light.

There is no version of that verse where love is having a nice time. The chapter that gets read out at weddings is describing something closer to a long walk with a weight on.

You are doing what that chapter calls love, and none of those four verbs has ever once described enjoyment. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says beareth all things, endureth all things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a car on the way home from a conversation about somebody else's daughter.

And look at what is not in the list. Enjoyeth is not there. Delighteth in is not there.

That is not an oversight. The passage is describing what love does rather than what it feels, and every one of those four verbs is an action a person performs whether or not the feeling is present.

You are described accurately by that verse, and the absence of delight has never once put you outside it. It is written in 1 Corinthians 13:7 that love beareth, believeth, hopeth and endureth, and the Spirit of God is the one who defines love by what it does rather than by how the afternoon went.

Joy is not the qualifying word

Now let me name the mistake that has been quietly running for six years, because it is a wrong standard and it came from a conversation in a parking lot rather than from Scripture.

The word joy got installed as the test. If a parent enjoys their child, the love is real. If they do not, something has gone wrong somewhere and it is probably in them.

Nothing in Scripture sets that test. The passage that describes love most fully does not mention enjoyment once, and the parents in Scripture who are described as loving are mostly in some kind of difficulty about it.

So the standard you have been failing was never issued. It came from an ordinary sentence said by a kind person about a different child in a different house.

1 Corinthians 13:7 measures love by bearing rather than by delighting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who removes a test that was never set.

You are not failing a test, and joy has never once been the qualifying word for love anywhere in Scripture. 1 Corinthians 13:7 lists four verbs and enjoyment is not among them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes away a standard nobody issued.

And here is the plain thing, because six years of the private column has turned into something.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about you or about that child.

It is an honest person refusing to use a word that does not fit, which is integrity rather than coldness, and most people would simply have said the word.

You have not been failing to love that child, and refusing a word that does not fit has never once been the same as withholding something. The written word defines love by four load bearing verbs in 1 Corinthians 13:7, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to grade a parent on a vocabulary they did not choose.

Hopeth all things

There is a verb in the middle that is easy to walk past and it is the one with a future in it.

Hopeth all things. That is not optimism and it is not a prediction.

Hope in the Scriptures is a settled expectation about what God will do rather than a guess about how things will turn out. It is not the same as thinking a hard child will become an easy one.

You are given hope that is not a prediction about anybody, and it has never once required a forecast to be real. It is written in 1 Corinthians 13:7 that love hopeth all things, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies expectation without ever promising a particular outcome.

And it sits between believing and enduring on purpose. The order is: bear it, believe about it, hope about it, and keep going. Hope is in the middle of the work rather than at the end of it.

1 Corinthians 13:7 puts hope inside the carrying rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies it in the middle of a hard stretch instead of on the other side.

You have hope available in the middle of this rather than after it, and it has never once required the difficulty to lift first. 1 Corinthians 13:7 puts hopeth between believeth and endureth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands hope to somebody who is still carrying.