June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 170 – 19 June
Leave a little give
with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love. (Ephesians 4:2, NASB)
Spend enough time close to anyone, and the small things begin to surface. The friend whose warmth first drew you turns out to interrupt every story you ever start. The colleague you admire chews with his mouth open in a way you can no longer unhear. The relative you love keeps pressing the same advice you politely declined a decade ago. None of these are sins worth a sermon, merely the ordinary grit of being human alongside one another, and yet left untended they can sour a good relationship into a standing grievance. Anyone who has lived inside a family, a marriage, a shared house, or a close-knit church knows the feeling intimately, and knows too the uncomfortable second half of the truth, that we ourselves are, to somebody nearby, the very habit that grates. Paul handed the early church a single word for managing all of this, and it proves wiser and warmer than the grim toleration we might brace ourselves to expect.
A word that means making room
The word was ἀνέχομαι (anechomai, meaning to bear with, put up with, or make allowance for), and it describes something far more active than gritting the teeth and enduring. At its heart sits the idea of holding steady under a strain while granting another person room, the deliberate choice to give people space to be imperfect without the bond between you snapping. To make allowance for someone, in this sense, is to extend a margin around them, a generous band of give within which their faults can exist while doing no real harm. The word assumes, with a kind of gentle realism, that everyone arrives carrying rough edges, and that love’s work is seldom to file those edges away but to leave enough room that they stop catching. A real humility lives inside it too, since the command runs in both directions. You make allowance for others while they, just as patiently, make allowance for you, and a community survives only while that generous give keeps flowing every way at once.
The gap the engineers leave on purpose
On a long steel bridge, somewhere along the roadway, you will often find a strange toothed gap where the two halves of the structure meet in an interlocking comb with a finger’s width of empty air between them. It looks at first like a flaw, a job left half done, yet it ranks among the most carefully calculated features of the entire design. Steel swells in the heat and shrinks in the cold, and a bridge built as one rigid slab would buckle and crack through its first scorching summer. So the engineers leave deliberate gaps, expansion joints that let the metal breathe and shift, soaking up the daily push and pull that would otherwise tear the whole span apart. The same wisdom runs through every structure built to last, from the swaying crown of a skyscraper to the slight play left along a railway line. Rigidity, against all instinct, is the thing that shatters under stress, while a little built-in give is what survives. People work no differently. A friendship or a fellowship held together with no margin at all, insisting that everyone fit flawlessly and behave just so, will crack along the very first hairline of difference. The give you extend to one another, the room to be imperfect, is the very thing that keeps the whole structure standing through the heat and cold of passing years.
The give that love runs on
This is what Paul was asking of a young, mixed, sometimes prickly church, and it remains the daily craft of living as partakers together. Real togetherness was never going to mean assembling a group of people with no annoying edges, since such a group has never existed and never will. It means, instead, building enough give into our love that the inevitable friction is soaked up rather than left to fracture us. A deeper current runs beneath the command as well, for the patience we are asked to extend is only an echo of the boundless allowance heaven has always made for us. We who are forgiven so much, and borne with so gently by a God who knows our every rough edge, can surely spare a little of that same grace for the people right beside us. So you leave the small things unspoken, you assume the kinder motive, you let the irritation drift past, and you grant your brother or sister the same wide margin you so badly need yourself. A church that learns this give becomes very nearly unbreakable, bending through every season without ever once coming apart.
Declaration
I am learning to leave the people around me a little room to be imperfect. Their small faults and irritating habits, the ways they fall short of how I might prefer them to be, I am choosing to absorb with patience instead of letting every friction harden into resentment. I remind myself, often, that I am somebody’s difficult person too, and that the grace I find so easy to want is the grace I am called to give. So I make allowance generously, cutting others the very slack I am forever hoping to receive, and I let the small things go long before they grow large. Today I build a little give into the way I love, sure that the bonds able to bend are the ones that last.
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