Love

 There are days when love feels poetic. Soft light. Long memory. Gratitude.

And then there are days when love has to survive bureaucracy.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians are often read at weddings, usually by people who have not yet had their patience professionally tested. The words sound gentle until life decides to interrogate them.

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind.”
“Is not easily provoked.”

That last one is the line that caught me today. Not because it is beautiful. Because it is brutally inconvenient.

A system holds my son in detention.
A number is named. Twenty five thousand dirhams.
Then the manager is suddenly out of office.
It is Sunday.
The typing center is closed.
The system does not accept payment at the police station.

Nothing is technically wrong, and everything is morally absurd.

So my son stays one more night. Not because justice demands it. Not because safety requires it. But because systems do not care how long a father’s heart can be stretched before it snaps.

This is where love stops being a feeling and becomes discipline.

“Charity seeketh not her own.”
That means I do not get to indulge rage, even when rage feels justified.
“Thinketh no evil.”
That means I do not get to assume malice where there is only indifference.
“Endureth all things.”
That means I endure the waiting without letting it poison me.

I wanted to pace. I wanted to argue. I wanted to force the system to feel what it was doing. But love does not always confront. Sometimes love absorbs.

Here is the strange grace of the night.
My son slept - I hope. He has no access to a phone so I don't know, I hope.
My wife slept.
And for the first full night in days, I slept too.

Not because the problem was solved.
But because love did not let anxiety run the house.

Paul was not writing about romance. He was writing about pressure. About what remains when power, knowledge, certainty, and control all fail at once. “When I became a man,” he wrote, “I put away childish things.” One of the most childish things is believing that outrage alone produces righteousness.

Love that is not easily provoked is not weak.
It is restrained strength.
It is choosing not to multiply harm just because you are capable of it.

I still want my son home.
I still want the system to work.
I still want tomorrow to be different.

But tonight, love held the line.

Faith, hope, and charity remain.
And when everything else feels partial, delayed, or broken,
the greatest of these is still love.