“Mom, it feels so good when you help someone”

“Of course it does O, that is what you were made for”

And there it was, suspended in the air between us.

“O…Everything in you was created to love God and the people around you. It is your job in the world”

The truth of all of our lives, when all else is stripped away, should boil down to this.

Theology can be crippling in its application. Life can be challenging with all its frustrations. Church politics and our own preferences can make us sharp and selfish. And even love can often be more complicated than sharing your extra fruit leather; first grade kind of simplicity won’t last forever even though it should. Love at its most generous can be misconstrued as lust at its most selfish… But still how do we keep our lives spinning on the axis of LOVE alone? When we live a world that complicates, over analyzes, thinks the worst of others, seeks to feed our own fulfillment, what then do we do? How do we live that out?

Later, when I take my little girl to bed, there is an envelope on her pillow. Her face near lights up the dark room and she opens it to find a drawing by her brother. The two of them, stick figures beneath the most basic of sunshine, and she is near shaking with the joy of the discovery. She runs to her big brothers room wraps herself around him. I sit on her bed, a bit shook by the sweetness of it. I hear down the hall:

“I did that cause I love you so much E. Did you know that is what we are supposed to do? Love each other and God too.”

As simple as that. Create a space in your heart for the person that is before you right now, let them know that the space they are treading belongs to them alone. Make space there for God too. When our minds spin on this? Somehow all the rest of it makes so much more sense.