I’m honored to live in a City of Character and thankful that we make time every month to focus on a quality of character worth cultivating. It’s always helpful to remember that being a City of Character doesn’t mean that we always get it right. It means we have a standard we can celebrate when someone succeeds, and that we can correct back to when someone misses the mark.

With that in mind, the character trait of the month is tolerance.

I have to confess. I’m not a big fan.

I know that sounds strange. But there’s something about tolerance I find intolerable.

When a doctor talks about tolerance, they’re often referring to the inability of our immune system to withstand the threat posed by a common virus.

When an engineer talks about tolerance, she’s setting the limit for the maximum weight a bridge can withstand before it breaks.

And of course, there’s the wisdom of that great philosopher… Popeye the Sailor Man, who timidly protects Olive Oil from Bluto until, “He’s had all He can stands and He can’t stands no more!”

I struggle to like “tolerance” because “tolerance” seems like a measure of weakness rather than a source of strength. It feels like a discussion about limitations rather than a conversation about possibilities. It sounds like a demand for every one to slow down because of the weakness of only one.

And then I remember, tolerance isn’t a singular quality of character. It’s an emergent property that’s revealed when multiple characteristics come together.

Let me explain. I’m trying to learn a new skill. I’m tired of eating store-bought bread that tastes like sadness. So, I’m on a quest to learn how to make simple, four-ingredient bread. On their own, each ingredient is edible but not flavorful. But mix them in a bowl. Let them sit uncomfortably together as the yeast agitates them all. Deliberately expose them to the heat of an oven and watch what happens as everything comes together. Four ingredients become one loaf of bread that brings comfort, warmth, and delight to any table. Tolerance is like that.

Tolerance begins with patience, a willingness to make room for one another — to give each other the time we need to understand, even celebrate, our differences, work through our disagreements, and to correct the ways we may be misinformed.

When patience meets grace, it changes the consistency of our relationships. With grace, we give one another what neither of us has earned or deserved. We choose to believe in the best about each other rather than assume the worst.

Next comes confession, a personal willingness to admit when I’m wrong. This is the ingredient that agitates. No one likes to admit when they’re wrong, but something powerful happens when we honor our weaknesses, own our mistakes, and find the humility to change our minds because we learned something new. Honest confession causes every relationship to rise.

Finally, we mix in forgiveness. While confession agitates, forgiveness ameliorates. Our reluctance to forgive is really a misunderstanding of justice. When I’m wrong, I want mercy. When you’re wrong, I want justice. When we forgive, it feels like it violates justice because somehow, we’re letting someone get away with it. This is why the biblical perspective on forgiveness is helpful. In Scripture, there is no forgiveness without the satisfaction of justice. God forgives us because Christ paid the penalty for the wrongs we’ve done. Justice satisfied. We can follow that example. When we forgive someone for the wrongs they’ve done to us, we release them into the hands of God. In His hands, they will either receive the penalty they deserve or the same kind of mercy we hope God and everybody else will show us. Either way, we’re free from the burden of their error, and justice is satisfied.

That’s the risk I find when we make tolerance the point instead of the process. Rather than mutual submission out of mutual respect, tolerance becomes mutual isolation. For fear of offense, we just leave each other alone. You struggle alone in your weakness, and I in mine. When patience, grace, confession, and forgiveness are far from us, tolerance becomes a measure of limits rather than a celebration of strengths. It’s an excuse to ignore what’s good and choose what’s easy, to leave behind what’s right and replace it with selfishness, to leave each other stuck in a cycle of harmful habits or misguided thinking because we’ve settled for being cordial. With the wrong kind of tolerance, we’re not good for each other, or bad to each other. We’re just dismissively nice.

Let’s not build a quality of character that tastes like sadness. Let’s be the people who enter the danger, and with patience, grace, confession, and forgiveness, practice the kind of tolerance that moves us to draw close to one another, to give strength to and gain strength from one another. That kind of tolerance becomes the sweet aroma of a community filled with comfort, warmth, and delight. Tolerance like that brings everyone to the table and keeps us all coming back for more!