Bearing With, Not Just Putting Up With

There's a difference between putting up with someone and bearing with them. Putting up with is enduring through gritted teeth and a sideways glance, fueled by pride. Bearing with, as Paul writes it, is different: it's an active choice of love.

He brings together three things: humility, meekness, and longsuffering. Longsuffering is long-term patience — not the patience of one bad moment, but the kind that lasts weeks, months, years.

None of us is easy to live with. That's the truth we tend to avoid saying. You have habits that irritate, ways of acting that wear people down, days that exhaust the person beside you. And so do I. And so does your friend. And so does your family.

That's why Paul isn't asking for a special favor for special people. He's describing the everyday reality of Christian love: bearing with one another in all humility, because we know that we, too, need to be borne with.

That isn't weakness. It's maturity. It's love that knows its own faults and therefore has mercy on the faults of others.

Today, whose patience will you need? And who will need yours?