With All Your Heart

Love, amor, aimer, amore © by Camdiluv ♥

Sometimes Valentine’s Day is nauseating.  I went to the grocery store yesterday and the day before, and I was overwhelmed with the red flowers and boxes of chocolates, and cookies, and cakes.  It is not that I don’t love love, but sometimes, the whole thing is just too much for me.  Perhaps it is the cynical side of me.  Because I do love a good romance.  But there is a part of me that just doesn’t always appreciate it all of the time.  Maybe it is because over time, real life takes over, and romance is found in simple ways and places.  I’m not sure.

Anyhow, I have been faced with some radical thoughts as of late.  Giving out of poverty for example.  I mentioned it in my last post.  I am reading the book 7 by Jen Hatmaker, and although I am making my own rules for her experiment, I am undergoing the Great Purge.  Giving away.  Thinking through a lot of things.  Now, I haven’t figured out my thoughts on these things, but I’m rethinking a lot of what should I do next type of things.  Like, for example, we have considered putting our house on the market.  Maybe, though, we are supposed to give instead of sell and buy bigger.  I don’t know.  I’m just thinking and pondering, and I feel sure that God will direct us for His plan.  {If His plan includes a Ugandan orphan, I’m not sure how we’ll fit it in this house, but I follow.  He leads.}

When it comes to Valentine’s Day, who, tell me, does not like to be made much of?  All of us at some point want to be made much of.  We want to know we are valued.  We want to know we are loved.  We want to know someone in this life thinks we are #1.  I think maybe that’s why I don’t always appreciate all the stuff of Valentine’s Day.  Someone out there is not going to be made much of.

Recently, I made a pick up at an acquaintance’s home.  She didn’t want me to come inside her house.  She said she was sick and didn’t want me to catch it, and maybe that’s all it was.  But her face told me a different story.  See, last month, she had visited my home for a birthday party.  And her face, it said she was ashamed to show me her house because she had seen mine.  The reason why I recognized her face is because I’ve made that face many times.  I have gone in a home, uncomfortable because it was so much fancier and nicer than my own.  My suspicions were confirmed when I later heard her speak of her daughter’s clothing.  Friend #3 mentioned buying a well known children’s clothing name brand.  My acquaintance said she was too cheap to buy that brand.  I understood what she really meant was I don’t have the money to afford that brand.  Sure I am speculating, but in all reality, I don’t think I am too far off.  And even if I am way off, let’s pretend I am right.

Would buying a bigger better home make this woman comfortable in my house?  Not hardly.  Would it make her feel like much?  No, it would make her feel smaller, and maybe the idea is not that I should have more, but that I should have less and give others more.  I want desperately for this acquaintance friend of mine to know she is thought much of.  I’ve been thinking about ways to serve her. But mostly, I’m aware of how, and I am uncomfortable using this word, rich I am.  I am not rich by American standards nor by the standards here in my city or at my church, but I am rich.  The speaker at church on Sunday said that in America you are considered in “poverty” if you are a family of 4 making less than $24,000.  However, compared to most parts of the world even the American poverty level is considered rich.

I just feel like going all in.  Giving it all away; don’t worry Daniel won’t let me go nuts.  Which reminds me of something I am trying.  Giving out of my poverty.  Choosing to give where it hurts.  Like doing something that takes time when I don’t have any time left.  They say this will increase my joy.  I know I certainly slept better last night after choosing to give out of my lack.

But just maybe, a little bit, this giving, is a piece of what it means to Love the Lord your God with ALL your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  When we love Him because He loved us first, we are willing to give it all back to Him because He gave it all to us.  He gave us His son, who died, so we could live life abundantly.  Perhaps this abundant life is upside down topsy-turvy from the life we think is abundant, just like that King who was laid in a manger.  He has made much of you and me already, and He desperately wants us to take that muchness and pass it on, so someone else knows they are made much of by a King who was not made much of in His time here, so that we show Him that He has our heart.  Every stinking last bit of it – our whole heart.  I don’t know about you, but I want to make much of some one today.  Won’t you?