There are four silver bracelets on my wrist. Each one is inscribed with scripture. Their jingling sounds reminds me to heed the words.
One holds the passage from Corinthians 13.
"Love is patient. Love is kind; love does not envy; love does not boast, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked; does not rejoice in evil, but rejoices in the truth; It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
That is a high bar, indeed. And yet it can protect us from insidious feelings that can creep in.
The book The Garden Wall is a lovely fairy tale about two children, Petra and Seth. Their families live near each other, and their parents teach them skills like masonry and gardening. Their friendship begins
slowly, like a stone wall or a vegetable plot. They help each other with the labor involved in digging, and stacking rocks. Sometimes they hurt one another's feelings, but they find ways to forgive. They find the energy to resist being provoked, or to give up. The directives in the passage from Corinthians are engraved in the margins of the pages, as they name the ways that their love is growing.
In the end, the wall they have built, the one with flowers blooming, becomes the setting for a wedding.