Tied Together (Friday Devotional)

And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

- Colossians 3:14

When I was a Boy Scout, I was never good at tying knots. Knot tying is famously a key activity for Boy Scouts, and learning everything from a bowline to a clove hitch is a requirement if you want to advance from Tenderfoot to Eagle Scout. Nevertheless, I didn’t take to it, and would basically learn each knot five minutes before showing it to my troop leader, get the requirement signed off, and then promptly forget what I had learned.

The one exception was the square knot, which has fewer steps than it takes you to tie your shoes. Even given my disinterest and ineptitude, the square knot was simple enough to stick with me, and it became my go-to whenever I needed to bind two ropes. The trouble is, the square knot’s simplicity is matched by its weakness—it’s easily undone, and should never be used for supporting weight. If you want an easy bond, the square knot is fine, but if you want a strong bond, you have to look to something quite a bit more difficult.

In today’s fractured society, some bonds are easier to create than others. Many with public platforms have found fear to be an easy way of bringing people together—if enough people are scared and resentful about the same things, they’ll join together against those common enemies. Others have turned to nostalgia, bringing people together by getting them to ignore the present and dwell on the past. Still others have relied on far-reaching promises to hold their audience together. All of these are ‘square knot bonds’—they’re easy to form, but they’re unstable and unreliable.

The Lord calls his disciples to a more difficult bond: Christlike love. Unity in love takes a lot more time to produce than an alliance of fear, because it requires trust. It’s a harder sell than an alliance based on nostalgia, because it works through difficult subjects instead of skirting them. It’s not as cheap as big dreams, because it asks for sacrifice instead of just promising the moon.

But as difficult as the bond of love is to achieve—especially compared to the ‘square knot bonds’ we are offered elsewhere—it is incomparably strong. Drawing on the example of the cross and the power of the Spirit, love keeps people together when other bonds are quickly broken by circumstances. Love, as Paul succinctly puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:13, never fails.

Because of how fragmented our culture has become, you have no shortage of people trying to bring you into their fold. May your alliances not be based on ease, but Christlikeness—because, as even this knot-tying novice can tell you, the easiest bonds to form are the first to break.