Love is not mere emotion. Biblical description of love is characteristics. This has interesting implications because characteristics are qualities we can work on within ourselves. We don’t have to wait for ‘love’ feelings to come but actively work on it to ‘be love.’ This is a series about how to teach our children love.
The first characteristic of love in Corinthians is patience. How do we teach patience? Too many times, we seem to think patience is not showing our negative emotions. When kids get crazy or rude or show attitude, we ‘patiently’ hide our anger, frustration, and annoyance. Meanwhile, we pretend to be ‘listening, guiding, instructing, and drawing boundaries.’ We ‘try.’ This is why when the kids go one more step further, we lose our temper, show highly escalated emotions, demonstrate all the actions of negative emotions we never intend to show. ‘Patience’ is gone so easily.
Real patience in love is about ‘always coming back.’ It is not because we have to, or stuck in the same situation with our kids’ misbehaviours, but because we actively come back to work on it despite failures and disappointments. We may come equipped with different strategies, ideas, or changes in environments but we do not run away. We do not stop teaching because it is hard for us. We only stop when our children have learned it. This is real patience. Now we understand why patience is love. It is not easy to come back to unresolved but prolonging problems. It is so much easier to put it aside and escape. Love makes us come back to it but also if we want to love, we can determine to come back.
Modelling this patience, we can teach our children to be patient. We want their patience to be more than waiting for their turn with a toy for 10 seconds. This is passive waiting. If we want to teach patience in love, it needs to more proactive. We can praise them coming back to the problem and work on it. We acknowledge their efforts to find different ways to solve the problem. We take notice when our kids do not run away from their own friendship problems and decide to work on it. We feel proud when they persist through solving a problem and when they finally do it. We label their actions, intentions and words ‘patience’ so they learn what they are demonstrating.
When we encourage our kids to be patient, we do not want to make them do it using parental authority, or overwhelmingly persuade them to keep going. When kids do not want to be patient, we can remind them of the natural consequences and pros and cons of it as in teaching, but ultimately we respect their decision and ensure to make them feel we do. This would be our patience to teach them patience.
Let’s start small and start noticing when our kids come back to solve a problem they couldn’t yesterday!
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