So what makes goodness different from kindness? Aren’t they the same thing? I used to feel the same way. The short answer is, they are similar but not the same. In Galatians, the Greek word for kindness is chrestotes, like we learned last week, but goodness is derived from the word, agathosune. Where kindness means serviceable or helpful in a tender, concerned way, goodness means “virtue equipped at any point,” or a more righteous integrity.

Patience. No one likes talking about patience. Love? Joy? Peace? Those are all Fruits of the Spirit that people love talking about, but patience? Pass. In truth, patience is a hard virtue to work on, because it’s one season of life’s seasons we’d all rather avoid; but at the same time, we can’t cultivate patience within ourselves if we are never challenged to wait.

First, love: a love that can only be shared once it is experienced in its deepest form, by realizing the love God gave to us and allowing it to transform us from the inside out. Second, joy: a joy that wells up and overflows from the innermost parts of us and is not dependent on external happiness to be sparked or sustained, having the ability to remain joyful for others regardless of our personal issues. Today, peace. More specifically, inner peace– as the Amplified Bible so specifically points out. Are you noticing a trend? Because I am!

Last week, love. This week, joy. I think this Fruit of the Spirit is a little taken for granted. I’m not sure many people would come out and say, “I have an issue with joy,” or “I find it hard to be joyful.” But I think that’s because we have a misunderstanding of what joy truly is.

The Fruits of the Spirit remind me of Sunday school lessons. No matter where you go to church, odds are, if you were a kid there was some kind of poster or coloring sheet that had pictures of apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, etc. and they all were labeled with a different fruit of the Spirit. There are songs that we learn in order to memorize them, and maybe you were given a piece of candy or a prize if you could list them all off the top of your head. As we get older, the term “Fruits of the Spirit” feels like a Christianese phrase that is glossed over and never really thought about beyond that Sunday school lesson from decades ago. It’s kind of on the same level as the armor of God, or the Ten Commandments: really, it’s a foundational idea to the Christian walk, but it’s reviewed so often that we forget the precious values these things hold for us to spiritually mature past the Bible basics.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing what Paul really means when he tells wives to be submissive to their husbands in Ephesians. It is my deep desire that, if you’ve been reading along, you have found peace surrounding the subject and that the Lord’s character has shone through. This week, I want to further delve into the subject by taking the key verse through which the other side of the argument stakes its claim to validity. And I’m not talking about those that just flat out renounce God and the Bible. I’m talking about Christians; those that believe that wives being submissive to husbands is an “antiquated cultural ideal” that died off with tunics and the Roman Empire. The thought process on that end of the spectrum is that there should be no submission between genders when God has declared us all as one.

When I was a little girl, my grandma had this bookshelf with a series of short story books on it. I remember I loved to look at them, the spines straight like soldiers in a row, all the same color, all the same size, and lined from one end of the shelf to the other, yet all incredibly different on the inside.