#8: I’m a Great Person Until I’m Around People

Our church has been working through a sermon series on the Fruit of the Spirit. You probably know the list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It is a great list. It is also considerably easier to read than to live. If I were allowed to build my own personal fruit basket, I would probably load it with joy, add some peace, grab a little love, and call it good. Patience? I'm out. Gentleness? Maybe next year. Self-control? Okay, maybe gentleness isn't so bad?!?

The problem with the Fruit of the Spirit is that God apparently expects us to practice these things around other people. That is where this gets complicated.

Love is wonderful until someone becomes difficult to love.

Joy comes naturally until the day falls apart.

Peace sounds great until a text arrives that begins, "We need to talk."

Patience is fantastic in theory until you find yourself behind someone going 57 in the left lane.

Kindness? Absolutely, unless I have already explained something twice.

Gentleness? Of course, but have you ever called customer service?

And self-control? Let's not bring Costco into this.

What I am realizing through this series is that the Fruit of the Spirit is not really revealed when life is easy. It becomes visible when someone annoys us, plans change, we are exhausted, we do not get our way, or someone says something with which we strongly disagree. Perhaps most of all, it shows up when we have every opportunity to fire off the perfect response and choose not to. Nobody really knows how patient we are when everything is moving at our preferred speed. Nobody knows how peaceful we are when everything is going according to plan. And nobody knows how kind we are when everyone around us is being kind to us.

The fruit gets tested when life squeezes it.

That may be the lesson that has challenged me most. It is easy to think of these qualities as personality traits or ideals we either possess or do not. But perhaps they are better understood as evidence of what is happening within us, revealed most clearly when circumstances give us every reason to respond differently.

Patience matters because there are things worth being impatient about.

Gentleness matters because we occasionally have the ability, and perhaps even the justification, to be jerks.

Self-control matters because there are moments when losing control would feel incredibly satisfying.

And apparently, I still have some growing to do.

After listening to this series, I am beginning to think the Fruit of the Spirit is less like a perfect fruit basket sitting on the kitchen counter and more like God walking through the produce section of my life, inspecting a few things, and occasionally saying:

"Yeah, that one's not ripe yet."

Fair enough.

Still growing.

Keep the fire burning. 🔥