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Love

             Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

This wasn’t the passage I had in mind for today, but it’s the one shared by my Bible platform, and let’s just say that it’s a concept that I want to be (and that I hope is) central to my life. According to Jesus, it’s half of the greatest commandment. If we’re to have a mission in our lives, this is it. If we’re to have a ministry, this is its foundation and core.

Having said that, I have to return to my “no magic” idea. Functionally, “god” refers to anything that provides the foundation of our lives and beliefs. This means not all gods have to be personal. Science can be a god. Self can be (and very often is) a god. And even if you hate that god, if you don’t turn to another god, you’re still loving that god because your attention is focused on it, and ultimately, your behavior is in direct response to its demands. Love and hatred aren’t necessarily opposites, or become opposites only when the lover/hater and the object with which they are entangled are not only detangled but divorced, and the lover/hater finds another object. Someone who says “No gods!” doesn’t actually stop having a god. That person either keeps the same god or finds another.

So, to say that we are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, and strengths, in one sense, is simply to state the obvious. Whatever our god is, it’s just good sense that we should acknowledge that relationship and build our lives around it. If we build our lives around it, no matter how much we say we hate it, we’re still loving it. Where today’s passage shakes things up is that it claims an exclusivity of that arrangement on behalf of a specific god, an acknowledgement of the relationship that, in its original context, the Jews had already legally accepted 40 years earlier.

There are really two choices. You can pick a god and stick with him/her/it, or you can be a serial philanderer, jumping from one god to the next with the regularity of sunrise or the phases of the moon. I suspect that most of us end up in the “stick with” category because the alternative is too disruptive of life, but we tend to live closer to the philanderer mode because while we say we pick a specific god, we tend to live with several, including ourselves.

The key, then, is to keep choosing the one over the many, and that can only happen if we love the one and kick the many to the curb. And if we are to have a mission or a ministry, that dedication needs to be strengthened. For some, this process is instantaneous. For others, it takes time. And it may have to be repeated. That's what love is.

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