Gimme All Your Loveย
So tell me what do you want me to do…
You want me to lay down and play dead and do backflips for you?
Walk in your shoes for a while?ย
Tell me, what’s right?
Gimme all your love
Gimme all you got, baby
— Alabama Shakes
Joel 2:12-13 –ย Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;ย rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, whoย is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
That’s my Lenten discipline this year. To love God by loving God’s world more whole-heartedly. Brene Brown speaks and writes beautifully about loving and living wholeheartedly. It takes vulnerability, risk, and courage. It means letting go of shame, defenses and white-knuckled control. What does this look like in concrete practice?
Jesus offers some help at this point. He says where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also (Matthew 6:20-21). And he says not to invest it in material places where our investments areย easily destroyed – by moth or rust. One very concrete way to understand this teaching is to invest in relationships which are concrete yet so much more thanย mere material objects. To be sure, investing energy, money and love in the people weย care about can also come to destructive ends. Yet the investment of ourselves in work and love that follows our hearts . . . puts us in a realm beyond easy destruction. Relationships stay with us long after people are gone.
So this Lent, I’m going to explore more publiclyย howย love and wholeheartedness can be our guide to investing our lives – which is to say, all of our time and money – because in most cases it is our lives we trade away for time and for money.ย So with the vulnerability of weeping and mourning, not weakness, but courage, I’m aiming to explore the places where God is saying, “Gimme all your love.”
Where is God asking you to open your heart and share your love this lenten season?
