Love does not boast.
When I first read this passage, it was hard to understand what this could mean. Why does it mean that love does not boast?
In order to understand this concept, I had to redefine love. Love is not emotion, it is a character. The better person I am, the better love I can do. Because Jesus was a man who was perfect God, his love was the purest and the best love we could ever receive. This also explains immature love that is claimed to be love but hurts the beloved. Most parents love their children dearly but the depth of that love correlates with maturity of their characters.
With love redefined, what does it mean to not boast?
Maybe we should start with when we boast. We are tempted to boast how big our accomplishments are, how big my sacrifice was or how well I’m doing when we are self-absorbed. Either with strong or weak self-esteem, boasting comes to mind when all we think about is ourselves. If we are deeply in love and wholeheartedly care about someone, we would think about our beloved first. We would wonder how their days are going well, what they are going through or what we can do together.
In the book, Prayer, Phillip Yancey talked about how he could not help but wondered about all the prayers that did not get answered while listening to amazing stories of when it did. How would a mother whose child passed away a week ago due to leukaemia feel upon hearing another mom whose daughter got miraculously healed? This makes me think about how we share our wins. Would my celebration hurt somebody else? Is this why Jesus told several people who got miraculously cured not to share the news?
I believe love considers these things when we have things to celebrate, enjoy and share. Love makes us think about how the beloved would feel, take consideration of listener’s situations before telling what we want to share. This obviously is not always easy. Sometimes, we want to celebrate with our important people, we want to be acknowledged all our work and effort that was put into, and share the joy of long waited news. Yet, when we do take one step to think about listener before we speak, we would take the opportunity to practice love. This action of love, I believe, speaks louder than our words. Always, even when the listener could not appreciate it, God watches everything and every step we take to love.
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