I find it is the little things that get me. Tree crashes into the roof? I am calm and get on with coping. Chigger bites in sensitive places? I get grumpy and decidedly put out. The little things get me.
In scripture the little word “all” often trips me up. All?! You’d think the meaning of that would be self-evident, but sometimes…well, not so much.
Take for example Luke 10: 25-28 (NIV). A man asks Jesus what he can do to have eternal life and Jesus turns the table on him asking in return “what is written in The Law”? The man answers:
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’
Jesus agrees with him.
When I read it, I nod. I agree with Jesus – I am a follower of Christ, am I not? I should agree. But if I am honest, the word “all” is like a chigger bite. It bothers me. What is meant by “all?”
A child of 8 has a confession of faith and she brings ‘all’ of her 8 years of life to the table to love Jesus. Is this the same ‘all’ that she brings at 18, now a victim of sexual assault and incest? Or, to be gender fair, is the ‘all’ of a 14 year old boy the same as a 24 year old man who has served in a combat zone and now battles PTSD? I grant those are specific traumas and since many of us live pretty trauma-free lives, it is possible they are not representative of this problem of ‘all.’
I was speaking to a man whose daughter left for college recently and I asked him if he was happy or fearful about this new normal. He shook his head and said, “Both. She is level-headed, and I trust her. But I also want to tell her ‘be careful, be careful!’ The world is not kind. My heart is both proud and filled with fear.” You might argue that he has raised a capable woman – there is no trauma here. And yet…the “all” of his heart and mind today is surely different than the “all” of his heart and mind before he had this child-now-woman-grown. A child changes you – marriage changes you – job shifts change you — death in the family changes you – heck even buying or selling a car/house can change you. Let’s face it, life changes us…trauma or none. Who we are today is not who we were 10 years ago nor who we will be a decade hence. So, what is this “all” with which Jesus agrees?
Worse yet, who is this “Lord Your God”? My understanding of God as a child was only what I could grasp of the concepts of “father,” “protector,” “savior.” When my family disintegrated shortly after my baptism as a child, I prayed that Jesus would come save me and protect me. From the point of view of the child that I was, Jesus did neither of those things. Life went downhill after the divorce into sad and unsavory places. So much so, that I left the faith for many years. I was angry at a God who claimed to be my protector but did not seem to protect me – even though I prayed as earnestly as a little person’s heart could.
Coming back to my faith as an adult, I have had to tear down that understanding of what I mean when I say “the Lord My God.” I have had to grapple with the truth that He is more interested in my eternal soul than my comfort here on earth. He is more interested in His Kingdom than my kingdom. I am His servant, not the master. I have had to reconcile those painful truths with more comforting truths: He is still good. He still loves me. He has never left me…even though I ran a long, fast route away.
You see my understanding of who I am loving with whatever “all” I am bringing has changed. In fact, I am convinced that no human will ever fully understand God. He is infinite. We are finite. We shall only ever understand “in part” this side of glory.
So, were Jesus to ask me that question today (what does scripture say), my answer would be more complex than the man’s actual response. I would have to say this:
Bring all that I am today to love all that I know of the Lord My God today.
Please don’t hear me saying I would change scripture. Far from it! I am simply suggesting that my “all” – all of me today – is different today than it once was, and it will be different a decade hence from where I am today. Further, the same is true for all that I know of the Lord My God. As God teaches me more of who He is, then I may have a different, more nuanced understanding of “Lord My God”.
Of this I am certain: God is not shocked that you and I change…or that our understanding of who He is changes. Moses changed. Gideon changed. Peter changed. Paul changed. We, like them, will become different as we walk life out with God. Further, God is not shocked that our grasp of who He is changes. I would hazard that Moses’ understanding of God at the burning bush is vastly different than the God of whom He wrote in Deuteronomy. Likewise, the God Paul professed before Damascus was different from the Jesus of whom he wrote later in his life. They changed – their depth of knowledge of God changed (not that God changed – we change. God never changes.).
Could you and I be so radically different than these? I think not. The best any of us can do in obeying this command to ‘love the Lord Your God with all our heart and soul and mind’ is to do that to the best of our ability today. Or to put it another way, I bring all that I am today to love all of God that I can know today. For anything else, I rest in God’s assurance that He will finish the good work He began in me; that my security is in Him and Him alone.