All of It Was Never a Total

The candles came loose in the box on the way in, so there are eleven of them in her fist, and that is the hand she needs.

The other one has the cake box in it, held out flat and level the way you carry something that has taken two evenings. Under her arm is the bag with the party bags in it. The hall smells of hot vinyl and warm sugar, there is a laminated sign by the gate about socks, and somewhere up in the netting her own child is shrieking with the particular joy of a child who has been given lemonade and permission in the same afternoon. She counted the bags twice in the car. She has been on since the shops opened and she will be on again at bathtime.

Then the cake gets cut, and one of the other parents holds a slice out to her on a napkin, and there is a small pause while both of them look at the candles and the box and work out that there is nowhere for it to go. So it goes on the ledge by the gate, and there it stays, going soft, for the rest of the party.

And here is what nobody in that hall can see, because it does not show on a face. There is a sentence that has been living in her for months, and it surfaced again somewhere between the netting and the squash table. I want to love God with everything, and I do not know where the rest of me went.

You know that sentence. You are not cold toward Him, which is the confusing part. If anybody asked you outright whether you love God you would say yes without hesitating, and you would mean it. It is only that by the time the hall empties and the box goes back in the boot, there is a thin, quiet, worn-out strip of you left, and that is what arrives at prayer, and it does not look anything like all your heart, all your soul, all your strength. It looks like a slice of your own cake, held out to you in a room full of your own giving, and not one hand free to take it with.

Thin is not the same as far

Let me say the heavy part out loud for you, because you've been carrying it without a name.

You think you're the one person in your life who gets the leftovers of you, and you've made peace with that, except for God. Everyone else can have the tired version. Him you wanted to bring something to. And every time you come to Him with the shreds of a day, some old accounting starts up in the back of your mind and tells you that this does not count, that He asked for all of it, that other people manage whole hearts and you cannot even manage a whole hour.

Hear this gently, because it is true. You're not far from God. You're spread very thin, and thin and far are not the same thing, though from the inside they feel identical.

Now look at the command itself, and look at what comes immediately before it, because almost nobody does.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.Deuteronomy 6:4-5

You are loved first, and the loving you return is a response rather than a production. That is the order the word sets, and the Holy Spirit is the One who starts in a person what a person cannot start.

The command to love is the second sentence. The first is a word spoken to you, and what it tells you is who He is, and that He is one. Undivided. Whole toward you, on the day you're least whole toward Him. That undividedness is His before it is ever asked of you, and it is not on loan against your performance.

And the same order holds all the way through the Book:

We love him, because he first loved us.1 John 4:19

First. Not in reply. The love you're trying so hard to produce is not something you manufacture out of your own remaining energy and present to Him at the end of a long day. It is something you return. He started it, and He started it while your hands were full, and every scrap of love you've ever felt toward Him came out of His hands before it ever came out of yours.

So what does all of it actually mean, if it does not mean a full tank?

Notice how Scripture names a whole thing. Heart, soul, strength: not three columns to be scored, but the two ends and the middle of a person, named together the way you would say from morning to night and mean the whole day. It is not a total to reach. It is a way of saying: nothing kept in a separate room.

That is a completely different question from the one you've been failing. How much have I got left is a question about a quantity, and on a day like today the answer is honestly not very much. Is any of me kept back is a question about a direction, and a tired person can answer that one truthfully in about four seconds.

His friends once asked Him for exactly what you've been asking for. They said, increase our faith. Give us more of it, a bigger measure, enough to do this properly. He refused the request and answered a different question. He said that with faith like a grain of mustard seed they could speak to the tree in front of them and it would obey them. He did not top them up, and He did not tell them how short they were either. He moved the whole weight of it off the measure and onto the mouth.

You have an undivided God turned toward you on the day you are least undivided toward Him. Deuteronomy 6:4 says the Lord our God is one Lord before it says anything at all about your heart, and the Holy Spirit is carrying that into a thin morning.