As our states have issued stay-at-home orders and our worlds have all become smaller in the face of Covid-19, I’ve found myself in stillness and silence more than at any other point in my entire life (at least when small male humans are sleeping).
Travel to China is closed. Families in process of adopting lovies from the nation we love are at a stand-still. Information about the superheroes we normally advocate for is brief and long-coming from orphanages just trying to manage children amid a world pandemic that hit their country so hard.
The military families we love serving are in an unprecedented season of immobility and non-deployments. Moves have been cancelled. Service members are actually home. Many bases and posts have moved to mission essential staffing only, and the soldiers who normally spend holidays on separate continents, more than ever, are spending days and nights with superheroes who actually get tucked in by them at night.
The “Capes” and “Combat Boots” part of the causes we fight for on this blog are both in strange and quiet seasons.
And in the midst of it all, I, like so many people whose calendars have been cleared, have found myself somewhat lost.
“Lord,” I have prayed on so many of the last 17 days we’ve spent almost entirely inside our home, “we have more time, energy and space than we ever have in our entire lives. Where are we supposed to invest in this crazy locked-in season? For the love of toilet paper, what are we supposed to BE ABOUT?”
Because this girl likes themes.
This girl likes labels.
This Type A rule follower likes neat little lanes I can move up and follow and say, “This is where I stand!”
But the truth is, God doesn’t work in categories.
He doesn’t fit my life into labels and lanes.
And the simple answer I’ve returned to as I’ve gotten more precious time with Him than I have in my whole life is the same thing we as Christians have ALWAYS gotten to “be about.”
The beautiful and messy business of loving God and loving people.
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31)
Finding our identities not in what we DO but in WHOSE we are.
Pouring out our love and lives not because we are good at loving but because we are overflowing with the God who loved us so well FIRST.
Love doesn’t need labels, and it doesn’t need the neat categories I tend to sort my love into.
“Orphan care.”
“Military families.”
“Odyssey of the Mind teams.”
Love, as Bob Goff says, just DOES.
It’s a VERB.
It’s simply loving the person right in front of us with everything we have and everything we are, reflecting the perfect love of a God whose abundant love for us never ends.
And it’s doing what we can with what we have exactly where we’re at, as Franklin Roosevelt so beautifully articulated.
No matter whether that falls into our perceived “lane” or not.
What we have?
Words, time, energy, prayers.
Where we’re at?
The little community where God has planted us.
Who we can lavishly love?
Our children.
Our neighbors.
Our communities now facing devastating shut-downs that are shuttering the businesses of friends and families left and right.
The world and every class on branding and marketing tells us we as people and writers and bloggers and fighters for a cause need a singular focus, and we need to keep the main thing the main thing.
But what if what we were about, what if the thing we ALL advocated for, was actually THE main thing? The same thing JESUS HIMSELF was about?
Loving God and loving people?
Then maybe, just maybe, God could use us mightily in the only lane that REALLY matters in this life.
His.