Love is…Patient
"Love is patient…” — so begins the Apostle Paul’s soaring hymn to love, nestled in the heart of his first letter to the Corinthians. In our age of immediacy and unrelenting urgency, such a declaration may sound quaint, even impractical. Yet, if we pause, if we truly listen, we may hear in these three simple words a doorway into the heart of divine love — the love that formed the cosmos and sustains all things.
To say that love is patient is not merely to suggest that love can wait; it is to say that love knows how to wait. It is to say that love enters time without anxiety. Love does not rush. Love does not force. Love abides.
Patience, then, is not passivity, nor is it mere endurance in the face of inconvenience. Rather, it is a form of attentiveness. It is a steady gaze that refuses to be disturbed by delay or wounded by slowness. Love is patient because love is not consumed with the need to control outcomes. Love listens to the rhythm of the other, honours their pace, and trusts that God’s time — kairos, not chronos — is always at work beneath the surface of things.
To live in such love requires the surrender of our compulsion to fix, to judge, to push. Patience invites us into a holy restraint. It is the relinquishment of our demand that others be as we want them to be, when we want them to be so. Patience is love’s willingness to dwell in the incompleteness of the present moment, to remain tender even when change is slow, and to hold space for another without coercion.
In this way, patience is an interior spaciousness. It is the room within love where the beloved may breathe freely. And when we are patient, we begin to resemble the One who is ever-patient with us. The God who does not impose but invites. The Christ who waited through our betrayals, who stood silent before Pilate, who bore our delays and detours without contempt.
The patience of love is most radiant in the context of relationship — when one must wait through another’s silence, or walk beside someone whose healing is incomplete. In spiritual direction, patience may mean waiting through dry seasons, trusting that the Spirit is present even when the directee cannot yet perceive it. In marriage or friendship, patience often means loving not who the other should be, but who they are, even as they become.
The fruit of such patience is not only peace, but freedom. For as we learn to dwell patiently in love, we become less bound by fear, less reactive, more at home in the unfolding mystery of grace.
In the end, to say “love is patient” is to confess that love is rooted not in our striving, but in God’s fidelity. Love is patient because God is patient — not sluggish, but slow to anger and rich in mercy. In our own patience, however faltering, we mirror this divine heart. And in doing so, we participate in the eternal rhythm of the Trinity: the ceaseless giving, the holy waiting, the joy of love that is never in a hurry, because it never loses hope.
Jim Varsos