1 Corinthians 13:1-7: in context

Paul interrupts his teaching on spiritual gifts to write the most famous passage on love. He piles up the greatest gifts and achievements, speaking in tongues of angels, prophecy, all knowledge, mountain-moving faith, giving away everything to the poor, even martyrdom, and after each one drops the same verdict: without love, it is nothing. Then he describes love itself: patient, kind, not envious or boastful or proud, not rude or self-seeking or easily angered, keeping no record of wrongs, not rejoicing in evil but in the truth, bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things.

The first thing Paul does is measure the most impressive spiritual accomplishments against love and find them worthless without it. Eloquence, prophecy, knowledge, even the faith that moves mountains and the sacrifice that gives the body to be burned, all of it is nothing, he says, if love is absent. That is a startling scale of values. We tend to rank the dramatic gifts highest, and Paul says the most spectacular gift without love is a clanging cymbal, noise. Love is not one virtue among the gifts; it is the thing that gives all the gifts their worth, and without it the greatest achievements amount to nothing. And then Paul does not define love abstractly but describes what it does and does not do, and every line is practical, checkable, unglamorous: patient, kind, not keeping score, not easily angered. It is worth reading the description slowly and honestly, putting your own name in place of the word love, and feeling how far short it falls. The chapter is not sentimental; it is a searching mirror. The most gifted person, without this patient, kind, unself-seeking love, is nothing, and love is measured not in feeling but in these daily, difficult behaviors.

If I put my own name where the word love stands, how far short do I fall, and do I believe Paul that even my greatest gifts are nothing without this patient, kind, self-forgetting love?