“If you want to chart your progress on the spirituality journey, test the quality of your closest relationships—namely, by love and the fruit of the Spirit. Would the people who know you best say you are becoming more loving, joyful, and at peace? More patient and less frustrated? Kinder, gentler, softening with time, and pervaded by goodness? Faithful, especially in hard times, and self-controlled?
Are you growing in love not just for your friends and family but for your enemies? When you are hurt, wounded, and treated unjustly (as we all are), are you finding yourself increasingly able to emotionally release the bitterness, to absorb the pain and not give it back in kind? To pray for and even ‘bless those who curse you’?
And is all this feeling more and more natural and less forced? More and more like this is just who you are?”
—John Mark Comer in “Practicing the Way”
My prayer this week: Lord God, this week I ask you to grow your love in me. Fill my conversations with patience, kindness, and abundant grace. Help me release bitterness and frustration and let go of my desire to repay evil for evil. Bless my efforts to become the person you have uniquely created me to be: faithful, loving, and good.
