Socks breed in my house. I find them everywhere. Crumpled up, scrunched up balls of worn and sad behind bathroom doors, under couches, in front of televisions. Socks, socks, Everywhere! Sometimes I pick them up unthinkingly and without notice. Sometimes I pick them up, left eye twitching, nostrils flared, fingers pinching and flared in my protest. Then there’s the pointed carrying of them to the laundry or flinging them up or down the stairs like a missile in the direction of the perpetrator’s bedroom. Socks are minor in the grand scheme of life and laundry. Whether or not my family picks up their socks shouldn’t affect my approach to them or to life. But socks can be representative. Socks can tip the scale on hidden and buried emotions that seethe underneath the surface.  They can remind us of the little compounded slights and bigger issues that we experience in living life with other imperfect people. Because whether it’s at home with our families or interacting with our church family people can be hard to live with. It’s true. I’m hard to live with sometimes. I make mistakes, hurt people’s feelings, am insensitive at times and oblivious at others. And we feel like we have to just grit our teeth and bear it. Bear with people’s imperfections and the ‘I wouldn’t if I were them’ feelings that cause us to roll our eyes and sigh pointedly. And we tell ourselves that we’re dealing with imperfect people as we settle into our perfect feelings of self-satisfaction. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Ephesians 4:2 We can have more than resignation and bearing with one another. Paul speaks here of how we approach being in community with one another. What I like so much about this is that he doesn’t assume that people are perfect. He doesn’t say living with one another, communing with one another. He says bearing with one another. We bear each other’s burdens and we bear the things in others that burden us! But God wants more for us that just putting up with each other. He wants relationship and shared mission. And how do we do this amidst the physical and emotional ‘socks’? We love. We decide that we don’t just put up with people. We love them through the mist of their imperfections and see them, who God has made them to be and the dreams he has for them. Love makes bearing with others bearable. We don’t draw away like wounded animals when we are scraped raw, when others just don’t get what we do for them. We approach in love, hand outstretched and giving. But it’s hard, oh so hard. How do we love without the bitterness and judgement seeping in? Paul tells us this at the beginning of the verse. “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient”. Because when we seek to be humble it means that we look at other people’s specks through the planks in our own eyes. And seek to be gentle when their specks do come to the surface of life and relationship. We love others with the full knowledge of our own imperfections and love them as we thirst to be loved, with gentleness and patience. So as I pick up endless socks I ask God to show me my own debitage of mistakes and my own dirty corners. And I acknowledge that others bear with me. And within this new perspective of our communal brokenness and healing journey, I ask God for the grace and patience to love others in their imperfect journey as they love me through mine.