A Great Investment Today’s excerpt from First Corinthians ranks as one of the all-time best known and loved passages of the entire Bible. Frequently heard at weddings, its beautiful prose and powerful meditation on the theme of love never fail to capture our attention. This “hymn to love” proposes many reasons why we ought to rank love as an excellent gift. Among them, St. Paul’s statement “love never fails” sometimes escapes notice. By this Paul does not simply mean that “love always works.” Rather, the sense is that love goes on, love lasts, love is eternal. The final paragraph mentions gifts esteemed elsewhere in this letter: prophecy, tongues, knowledge. All of them are said to be passing or partial. Not so with love. When all these other gifts pass or are fulfilled, love will still be present, will still be active. Here St. Paul points us toward the truth that Love is the life of the Trinity—perpetual love, self-less love, Divine Love. Love is the life of heaven. This means that as you and I go about our business today and in the midst of the day choose to love—that is, as we choose to be patient, to be kind, to rejoice in the truth, to believe, to hope, to endure—we are engaged in something more than an individual action toward another individual or group. We are engaged in something that lasts, something Divine. Could there be a better way to invest our time today? |