What “Love Never Fails” Looks Like

This morning, as I prayed my way through 1st Corinthians chapters 12 and 13, I had four faces ringing in my heart. Today’s epistle continues from where we left off yesterday, pivoting into a passage that many of us proclaimed at our wedding ceremonies. At the heart of it are the words that stuck in my throat today:

Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, love is not pompous,
it is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails.

Fresh in my mind were four faces — loving faces who choked back tears to read a love letter of sorts. These are the children of Charles Vacca, known to us as the gun instructor who perished last month in a shooting range accident involving a nine year old girl. In this video, Charlie’s children show us what love looks like:

In this love letter, we have simply the voices of four amazingly strong teachers. Surely they have been through moments of grief, pain, anger and tremendous loss. And recording a video message doesn’t end all of that. But in this act, Ashley, Elizabeth, Tyler and Christopher help all of us move from an attitude of “How could this possibly happen?” to a posture of “How could they be so strong, so loving?” and finally, “How can I be more like this in my own life?”

Search for photos of “love” online and you’ll find all combinations of men and women, many of them dressed in white wedding attire. You won’t find the blurred out face of a broken-hearted nine year old or four fragile kids mourning their dad. But you should – because this ability to forgive, to think beyond ourselves and to embrace healing is at the heart of true love.

It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.

That’s the kind of love that never fails.