Let’s be honest, there are some people who just rub us the wrong way.  What they say bothers us, the way they say it annoys us, and sometimes just their presence bugs us.  None of those things sound very “nice” but it’s just the way it is.  Who knows, I could very well be that person to you.  We are a diverse group of people with different stories and backgrounds and we will simply never all be best friends and “click” like you do with certain people. 

The problem isn’t the fact that we all don’t have intimate relationships, after all, there’s nothing healthy about having an intimate relationship with every single person in the community.  That’s called dysfunction.  But the problem lies in the times where our differences or the way we rub on each other gets blown up and conflict breaks out.

In a church community I was a pastor at in New York, there was a certain young know-it-all who drove myself and a few other guys crazy.  One winter night, we had an outing to Central Park to go ice-skating and this young man we’ll call John hit Nick in the face with a snowball.  Not once, but twice.  Finally Nick got fed up and told John, “If you hit me in the face one more time, it’s on.”  Unfortunately that prompted John to see how far he could push things and he threw one more snowball.  This time Nick responded by tackling John in the snow and punching him repeatedly schoolyard style as the rest of us stood around in a circle stunned that this was actually happening.  This wasn’t the ideal church outing!  Nor did it make the rest of the time that night very pleasant. 

John definitely “deserved” a good butt kicking for several reasons and for that I did not necessarily blame Nick.  But what was lost in this is what is lost on several of us, the practice of forbearance.  The dictionary defines this as “a delay in enforcing rights or claims or privileges.”  Nick certainly had a “right” to retaliate, but forbearance is willing to deny the use of that right out of love for the community and love for God. 

As we have been going through the letter to the Corinthians I have noticed that this is not anything new.  The church in Corinth as we have seen was a community that displayed their lack of forbearance by exploiting their rights and freedoms to have sex with whomever they wanted, to sue those inside the community, and to use their “knowledge” as an excuse to abuse young Christ-followers by leading them back into their former lives.  In the context of these lawsuits Paul calls them to forbear, even to go so far as to suffer wrong rather than to assert your rights and make a mockery of community.  

Our time is not much different.  We are quick to enforce our rights and slow to give them up.  Our society encourages us to ALWAYS stand up for and assert our rights.  We eat a bad chicken nugget and we’re counseled to sue for millions!  We spill coffee on ourselves and we’re told the coffee was too hot; it was their fault!  The kingdom of this world tells us to be selfish whenever we can, to take what we can get, to never decline our rights. 

But that is not the nature of Jesus Christ.  And that is not the nature of the Kingdom that we have given our allegiance to. 

In Philippians we get an incredible picture of the savior.   His character is marked by humility.  His nature is marked by submission, giving up his rights, even his right to live for the sake of humanity.  Forbearance is a word that encompasses kindness, humility, patience, compassion, and a willingness to yield to the rights of others even in times when it may infringe on our rights, and Jesus exemplifies them all. 

A loving community of Jesus must be a community that practices forbearance.  Of course, not everything can or even should be let go as we see in 1 Corinthians chapter 5; there is a time and place for confrontation when damage is being done to people in the community.  But typically we (as individuals) probably err on making too much out of nothing, than we err on the side of letting too much go. 

I believe forbearance to be a spiritual practice.  And also, a very difficult one.  Naturally, we seek to be exacting and demanding in many areas of our lives.  We want what we want, when we want it.  And church is no different.  We want a certain kind of sermon, a certain kind of music, a certain kind of “feel” and if we don’t get it, then we will enforce our right to those things and leave!  But forbearance is an attitude of grace and humility that says, even though things don’t always turn out the way I want it, even though people say some things I disagree with from time to time, I can see how Jesus is working in this community and so I will choose to remain and participate.  But this is not easy; it takes humility, grace, patience, and a vision of Jesus as large as Philippians 2. 

-Dustin Bagby