1 Corinthians 13 for Husbands by Connie Grigsby

 If I speak in fluent tongues in the Board Room, but do not tenderly love my wife, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

 If I wax poetic about politics and business, and debate the great spiritual truths of our time, yet my wife feels disregarded and overlooked, my life is but a sham.

 If I volunteer for Life Chain, help out in Sunday School, and take my spot in the pew every Sunday – fervently writing down every word the pastor speaks, but if my wife sits stiffly beside me with a broken spirit because of my lack of investment in her life, I am nothing.

 If I treat others graciously, yet my wife feels compelled to undress in our closet or bathroom, and feels her way into our bed in the dark, all because of the way I’ve made her feel about her body, I live but a miserly existence.

 Love is patient, love is kind.  It takes no pleasure in spewing facts about legendary sports figures if it doesn’t know those things dearest to his own wife – her hopes and dreams, her fears, what makes her laugh, what wakes her up at 2:00 in the morning.

Love is not rude or self-seeking.  It doesn’t spend half the day investing in his golf game, and just 3 minutes investing in his marriage.

 It keeps no record of wrong, and does not hold her mood swings against her.  Love endeavors to understand how a woman can be singing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” one day, and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” the next.

 Love does not delight in evil, and it realizes that the inner glow of one’s wife is far more beautiful than the seductive look of a stranger who beckons to him from a billboard, movie screen, magazine cover or the internet.

 Love never fails.  But where there are football games to be won, they will cease.  Where there are fortunes to be made, they will be stilled.  The pursuits of this lifetime will one day come to an end.  But one will take into eternity his treatment of his wife on this earth. 

 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child.  Now that I’m a husband, I commit to putting childish ways behind me.  If I look in the mirror and don’t like what I see, I will ask God to make me over, and help me see that not only does my wife desperately need my love, but that I desperately need to give it to her.  Now I know in part, but one day I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 And now these three remain:  Faith, Hope and Love.  But the greatest of these is love.