A selfless kind of love

Week 02

“Love is patient, love is kind” – 1 Corinthians 13:4a

In my last post, I had a key pillar to discovering love as patience. As you might have guessed this week, the second pillar to discovering love is kindness.

I don’t know if this happened for you but for me, my first weeks in dating were all about putting her first. Opening the car door for her, letting her go through doors ahead of me, getting up to go serve her, the works. As most guys, we know that girls talk, so deep down I wanted them all to see me do these gentlemanly things and talk about it, later on when she is with her girls they will be praising my good efforts and I score points, thus they assert that I am that guy even without me being there *cue evil laugh*. But seriously, I wanted her to feel special, for real. And she did.

We all know that in dating, it’s the little things that matter to the girl, let me let you ladies in on a little secret, guys also notice the little things that you do/say. We act all macho because we don’t want you to see the super-sensitive side of our mushy inner selves. If as a woman, you have access to this side of your man, where he is emotionally open to you, he openly shares his joys and frustrations of his day or even when you can see when he is angry, sad, happy without him saying anything to you, then count yourself “in the inner circle”. This is a very privileged zone.

Patience is how love reacts to minimize conflict and promote love. On the other hand, kindness is how love acts. Patience avoids a problem, kindness creates a blessing. Kindness is the key that many of us realize begins to form bridges. As the second foundation to discovering love, let’s look at some distinct facets of kindness.

Gentleness: A sensitive, tender spouse will be careful how they care for their partner. Even in times of conflict, you go out of your way to speak the truth in love. Gentleness allows you to bend over backwards to make hard things easy to hear when you say them (in most cases it plays in after you have exercised patience with yourself to not lash out).

Helpfulness: this aspect of kindness allows you to meet the needs of the moment, like how a wife will easily serve her hubby when he gets home. Or how a hubby will quickly see that she needs a massage because of the long hard day she has had. Helpfulness teaches u to put our needs on hold and attend to the needs of our spouse.

Willingness: in my opening example of the gentle man, without the willingness to do these things. What today is a happy marriage may not have come to pass. And this plays straight into marriage for me, a willingness to listen to her when she is upset will spark the kindness that fizzles out many conflicts.

Initiative: if you don’t make the first move, who will? If you don’t take the first step to smile, greet, forgive, who will? Without initiative, (both of) you will sit around and wait to be coerced, persuaded, begged, <insert word of choice>. You see? If you don’t take the first step, you will have what programmers call a deadlock.

The last dare and this week’s dare were a challenge. I am very opinionated (as you can read). I had to learn to just chill sometimes, “she does have good ideas too” I would tell myself.

THIS WEEK’S DARE: On top of exercising Patience with your spouse, Dare to do some unexpected act of kindness. See what happens. Maybe even journal it, and if you dare, comment on this post with your challenges, thoughts, excitements about this dare.

Related articles

• A key pillar to discovering what love is (samkitots.wordpress.com)
• Love Dare, re-discovering love – An Introduction (samkitots.wordpress.com)