With all of you
All of you
Notice what Jesus does in the great commandment: he piles up the faculties. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. He could have said simply love God. Instead he names the whole range of human capacities — the emotions, the deep self, the intellect, the active body — and claims every one of them for the love of God.
This is the necessary balance to everything this stage has said about pathways. Yes, you have a dominant way of drawing near, a faculty through which God reaches you most naturally. But your pathway is where you start, not where you stop. The command is to love God with all of yourself — and that means deliberately stretching into the ways that do not come naturally, lest you grow lopsided, worshiping God with one favorite faculty and letting the rest go slack.
The contemplative is still called to act; the activist is still called to be still; the intellectual still needs the heart, and the enthusiast the mind. Your natural pathway is a gift, but it can become a rut and even an excuse. The fullness Jesus calls us to is a whole self turned toward God — heart and soul and mind and strength, every part awake and offered.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
— Jesus, naming the great commandment — Mark 12:30 (WEB)
Love God with all of yourself — worshiping along your natural pathway while deliberately stretching into the faculties that come hard, so no part goes slack.
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
Naming our type can quietly turn into a permit to stop growing — the quiet one excuses himself from action, the busy one excuses herself from stillness — and a single muscle gets all the work while the rest of the soul goes slack. The interior work is to take the whole command to heart, heart and soul and mind and strength, treating your natural pathway as a doorway rather than a hiding place, and to lean on purpose into whatever comes hardest, where most of the growth is waiting.
This week, identify the faculty you most neglect — stillness if you are active, action if you are contemplative, the heart if you live in the mind — and deliberately worship God through it once, stretching past your natural pathway into the whole self he asks for.
Pride is glad to dress a lopsided soul in the language of pathways, letting you camp in your easiest faculty and call the rest of you simply not your style. But a self turned wholly toward God — heart, soul, mind, and strength all awake — leaves no slack region asleep, and the stretching into the hard ways is where the growth has been hiding.
There is a subtle trap hidden in the language of pathways: it can become a license to neglect. Once I have decided I am a contemplative, I may quietly excuse myself from acts of justice; once I am sure I am an activist, I may never sit in silence. The pathway, meant to open a door, becomes a wall I hide behind, and my love for God shrinks to the one faculty I find easy.
Jesus calls us past that. To love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength is to refuse to let any faculty go slack — to worship along your natural pathway and still stretch, deliberately and humbly, into the ways that come hard. The stretching is where much of the growth happens. So honor your pathway, but do not camp there forever. Which neglected faculty might God be calling you to wake up and turn toward him?
- Has my pathway become an excuse to neglect the ways that come hard?
- Which faculty — heart, soul, mind, or strength — have I let go slack?
- Where is God calling me to stretch past my natural way?
Lord, I camp in the faculty I find easy and call it devotion. You ask for all of me — heart, soul, mind, and strength. Wake the parts I have let sleep, and turn my whole self toward you, stretching into the ways that come hard. Amen.