This is a meditation on chapter 1 from our Way of Life.

Love God with all your Heart, Spirit, Mind, and Strength.

The expansiveness of God’s love is more than I will ever be able to comprehend in this life. So how can I even begin to understand how God is asking me to love Him? 

Jesus tells me to love God with all my heart, spirit, mind, and strength. With my whole being. In all that I am. Jesus tells us this is the greatest commandment, so I can’t help but pause here. I pause to contemplate what He’s asking of me when He says to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”.  

In the stillness and quiet I sense that God is asking for all of me. Loving Him in and through every part of my being. Everywhere I go, everything I do, everyone I talk to, in every still hour – I am asked to love God in that moment. My faith, and my love of God is not something I should turn on and off. To love God is to embody the Spirit of God within me, in all that I am, and all that I do. 

Embodying God’s love is something I will continue working on my whole life. It is something intentional. Something I can only do by choice. Choosing to love someone takes effort in pursuing them. It demands that I lay down my own ideas, and get to know them and what is important to them. It means that I will sacrifice for the growth, beauty, and health of the relationship and the other. I also desire all these things with God, but they will only happen when I choose to love God in the midst of my life.

I choose to love God because God first loved me. I am met with the never ending love from God with all my faults, sins, mistakes, and failures. The love I know in this life would have me expect rejection, yet in Christ I am met with boundless love. As I sit here simply being myself, I find that the love of our God is with me. Not because I try to do things well, but because I am. God’s love is hard to explain, and sometimes it is hard to see or feel. Even though I get lost in the expansiveness of all God is, God has made a choice. He has found His way, through everything that is, to love me. So I choose to try. I choose to love God with all I am.

Photo Credit
Jordan Prins on 21 March 2022 in Paris, France.