Always strong
[Love] always hopes, always trusts and always remains strong
1 Corinthians 13:7b
New Century Version
I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I tried counting sheep but it made me miss New Zealand. All my herbal remedies (the totally legitimate kind) are with a friend. So, I picked up the mobile phone and started browsing facebook.
One of my Christian contacts had a status about 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 Love is patient. Love is kind … you know, the famous wedding verses. The usual trick with this passage is to replace ‘love’ with ‘God’ in an effort to override our Father Time-like images of the man upstairs. This person challenged themselves to replace ‘love’ with their own name.
Don’t ask me why I looked up the verses. I haven’t opened a bible in two years.
Laura always hopes, always trusts and always remains strong. It sounds naive. Some people should not be trusted. Hope fails and so does strength. It seems wiser (or at least easier) to lower expectations, be wary and to project strength. You can alway counter hope with reality, trust with remembered wounds and overall just harden the fuck up.
This kind of strength is like a muscles of gym ape. It looks impressive (oh so impressive!) but the muscles are only good at behaving the same way every time. There’s no balance, flexibility or range of movement in them. In the same way, projected strength can only react one way to everything, to harden the shell further and hide deeper … keeping you dark, brooding and brittle underneath.
Always hope, always trust and always remain strong … that’s a truly whole person, a person worth becoming.
Muchness 