If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
1 Corinthians 13:1 (NIV)
Paul Put Himself In It
The phone at the flower shop kept ringing after they stopped taking orders at noon. There’s a man in a good coat at the counter who has had the best year of his life, and he’s asked for the biggest thing in the cooler. The woman wrapping it has been on her feet since six and has stopped hearing the phone.
The church Paul wrote this into was arguing about whose gift counted for more, and he picked the most impressive thing that room had to offer. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
He wrote it in the first person. If I speak, if I have, I am only. Whoever stood up and read the letter to those people had to say the word I before the rest of them did, and the man who had taught them most of what they knew had put himself in the position of the gong.
Talking comes easy to me, and while I’m doing it I can’t tell how much is love and how much is habit.
This chapter gets read at weddings and it was written into a fight, and the question in it is about what a speaker brings into a room. It comes to a man eating at seven in the evening with the television on in the same words it comes to two people at a table with a candle between them. Both of them are good at something. The sentence asks what’s inside the thing they’re good at.
A gong is a real instrument and it’s doing what it was made to do. Paul’s complaint about it is volume without the person in it, sound arriving in a room and leaving the room exactly as it was.
Love is patient, love is kind. He builds the rest of it out of things you can do for a neighbor you’re tired of, on an afternoon nobody hears about. Patience takes days.
The man in the good coat goes out with the biggest thing in the cooler. The woman starts the next one, and when the girl behind him says she only has eleven dollars, she takes her time about it.
A Prayer to Remember
It’s the fourteenth of February, God, and the day has its own shape whether I’m in it or not. I’ll be around people today I’d rather move past than stay with. Make me patient with them, past the point where I’d usually be finished.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
