Suffers Long or Longsuffering

Today I reached a breaking point; of stress or emotional exhaustion or I don’t even know what except that I broke, it was one of those I can’t do this anymore I think I’ll just sit on my bed a cry moments, so as I prayed/cried I was thinking about love and how all I really want to do I walk in God’s love, be filled to overflowing and constantly giving it out to the people around me, but how, for at least the past few weeks I’ve been continually failing that task.

 

It was in that moment I felt the need to read 1 Corinthians 13, after doing so I decided that I wanted to write about almost everything in the chapter but its too much for one blog and one night so, I’m gonna take it one day at a time.

 

So for today, what stuck out to me was this; one line from verse 4 “Love suffers long and is kind;” I decided to look this up in my concordance because I was thinking that love suffers long was longsuffering and I wanted to know what it said about longsuffering, but what I found was even cooler. You see what I found out was that suffers long and longsuffering are actually two different Greek words; they have the same root and mean pretty much the same thing, in fact the only real difference I could see between the two was the way they were being used, but that is the really cool part, the first word makrothymeō suffers long is used in the being form like to be patient, the second word makrothymia longsuffering is used in the having form simply something you can posses like patience. And I love that this verse uses the being form.

 

After discovering all this really neat info I decided to read the verse again and found one more really awesome insight if you will. Or at least it was a wow discovery to me; because I realized that most of the time while reading this verse I was saying it wrong. Usually when I read it I would say “love is patient, love is kind” but that’s not how it goes at all what it says is love is patient and kind or as my version says love suffers long and is kind, you get it? If not, well that’s okay, what I saw today is that kind is a description of the way that love suffers. Just think about that. Goodnight.