With All Thy Strength on an Empty Tank

By seven in the evening she is finished and she has been finished by seven for about six years.

There is a job. There are two children, one of whom does not sleep properly and has not since he was born. There is her mother, who is not ill enough for anything official and not well enough to be left, and there is a house that is never more than about forty per cent under control.

She loves God. That is not in question in her mind, and she would say it plainly.

But the verse gets read at church about twice a year, and every time it happens something goes down in her.

With all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.

All thy strength. She has none. What she has by seven is enough to sit on a stair and look at a phone for eleven minutes and then get up, and whatever that is, she is certain it is not what the verse means.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She has decided that a wholehearted life is for people in a different season, and that she will be qualified to love God properly in about eleven years.

Read what all is doing

There is a word in that command that everybody hears as a quantity and that is doing something else entirely.

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.Mark 12:30

All thy strength.

All is a proportion, not an amount. It is the whole of whatever there is, and it says nothing at all about how much there is, and it never has.

All of a great deal is all. All of very little is also all. And a woman with eleven minutes of capacity who gives those eleven minutes has given precisely the same proportion as a woman with four hours who gives four.

And look at what happens two chapters earlier in that same gospel, when somebody puts in two mites. He does not say it is a nice gesture from somebody who cannot manage more. He says she put in more than all of them, and He says it because He is measuring proportion and everybody else in the room was measuring amount.

Your all is the whole of what you actually have rather than somebody else's total, and Mark 12:30 uses a proportion word rather than a quantity. That is what the word actually says, not a discount I am applying, and the Holy Spirit is the One who receives eleven minutes from a woman on a stair.

Eleven years is not a waiting room

Now the plain thing, and I want it said with some heat.

You've put your whole spiritual life into a waiting room with a date on it, and the date is when your youngest is grown and your mother has died. That is what the eleven years actually is, and I say it plainly because it is worth seeing.

Nobody in Scripture is told to love God later. The command is given to people in the middle of their lives, in a nation, with children and animals and work, and none of the qualifying conditions you've imagined appear anywhere in it.

And the arithmetic you have been running is somebody else's. Every time you measure what you have got against a person with capacity, you get the same answer, and it is the wrong sum.

And nothing about six exhausted years has ever put you in the waiting room. Scripture takes a proportion and never an amount, and the Holy Spirit is not asking a woman with two children and a mother to produce somebody else's four hours.

Give the actual amount

Here is the practical piece, and it is deliberately the size of your real life.

Take the actual amount and give it, this week, on purpose.

The eleven minutes on the stair. Give them, deliberately, once. Not by praying for eleven minutes if that is not in you. Sit there and say: this is what I have got and it is all of it.

Naming it as all is the whole exercise. What has been happening for six years is that you've been giving a small amount and grading it as a fragment, and a fragment is a piece of something bigger, and it is the grading rather than the amount that has been crushing you.

You are able to give the whole of what you have this week, and the amount was never what was asked for. Mark 12:30 measures all as a proportion and Mark 12:44 calls two mites more than everybody, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes eleven minutes and does not compare them to anything.