The life I’m made for
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
For his steadfast love endures forever. Psalm 107:1
Read Mark 12:28—34
My life is pretty listless if I don’t know any driving passion or purpose, if I just drift from one day to the next for whatever comes up. Jesus overheard a dispute between some scribes about who had the right interpretation of the commands of God. I think the deeper subtext was, what are we actually made for? Who’s found what I can throw myself into with assurance that I won’t be wasting my one chance at life? I want to be using my span of life on this plot of earth in the way I have been designed to do. And I want to be able to do it full-on without being a fraud. I know I can’t actually do this one full-on, love God with everything, love my neighbour as much as myself. I’ll never actually do that with any sense of completion. But equally I know there’s no other way for me to go. The road Jesus has put me on will keep going. It will be, all the way, the very way I am designed to go. So this life of love will always be new, always be filled with challenge and adventure, always bring me to my knees, keep me honest and reform me, and always be the right fit for me.
Lord, tonight I place myself before you, with nothing better to say than that I love you. It is a very feeble love that I have in myself. But I am in your Son. I love you, then, along with him, in him, as part of his own love for the Father, as the offering he brings to you. So I say in faith, I love you. And I pray that tomorrow I shall love my neighbour. That I will be as Christ to my neighbour. I think even now of some encounters I may have in the new day. Prepare me, with refreshing sleep tonight, to go in the presence of Jesus among my neighbours tomorrow. Let me see what love will bring.