In less than a month, my youngest daughter will be graduating from high school. She’s smart, conscientious, and a hard worker, which is reflected in her position near the top of her class academically. As her loving (and certainly unbiased) parents, my wife and I never doubted her ability to accomplish this. However, there was a time early in her years at elementary school when her grades weren’t quite so good.
One of the things that children struggle with is patience, and our daughter was no exception. If she had a school assignment or test, she wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. As soon as she received the task, she would quickly read it and try to finish. Unfortunately, in her haste, she was getting many of the questions wrong, and doing so in multiple different subjects. When we would review her work, we were surprised, because we knew she knew the correct answers.
We finally realized what was happening when we asked her to go through one of the assignments by reading aloud the problem to us. It was then that we realized that she was not reading the words correctly. She would see the first letter of the word and the general size, and assume what the entire word was. When you factor in the general vocabulary size of an early elementary school student, and consider that her brain would leap to grab the words that she was most familiar with, it became easy to see how she was substituting what should have been with words that didn’t belong.
Fortunately, the problem was easily fixed with a simple solution – slow down, stop making assumptions, and read every letter to ensure that you are reading what is actually there. Her scores improved significantly, and now she is preparing to graduate and head off to college.
The 13th Chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth is known as the “love chapter”. In it, Paul writes about the indispensable nature of godly love. Yet in the midst of this beautiful chapter, he writes the following: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.” By working this into the letter, Paul is stating two very important points for us to apply to our daily lives. Point one is that our knowledge is going to be incomplete, because our mortal minds cannot access some of the important information. Point two is that we should use love to overcome our lack of knowledge.
Impatience frequently causes us to make assumptions about events or people, and instead of filling in the blanks with love and grace, we draw from our biases and preconceived notions. If God, who has complete knowledge, were to grade us in the same manner that my daughter’s teacher graded her work in elementary school, we would all be shocked to see just how poorly we have been performing because of our judgements based on our incomplete knowledge.
In that love chapter, Paul wrote three simple words: “Love is patient”. Patience keeps us from jumping to conclusions. Patience recognizes that information may take a while to be gathered, and may well be incomplete. And love causes us to be patient, recognizing that God has been so very patient with all of us. So, slow your brains down a bit today, reach your conclusions with patience and diligence, and leave plenty of room for love and grace, recognizing that even your best decisions today will be made without complete knowledge.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron