Journeying to Easter - Part 2Намуна

An opportunity to practice love

My to-do list seems bottomless most days. I work hard to be a ‘good’ employee, wife, mum, friend, person… I get so caught up in the working and the trying, that I forget that at the middle of it all, LOVE is God’s priority. I forget that if I have love for God and for others, that’s everything.

We can work away, striving to please God – striving to tick all the boxes and prove our worth to Him. But, as the scribe said, to love God and our neighbours ‘is [worth] more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices’. Thankfully, love is less like a task list and more like freedom. Imagine a world where we lived like this. Go ahead, take a moment to consider it. What would today look like if you set the striving aside and allowed yourself instead to focus on how much you love Him? And on how much He loves you? Because the funny thing about love is it’s impossible to love others fully without first knowing we’re loved fully by God.

Lent is a great opportunity to train our focus back onto Jesus and to practice what He taught us. What if LOVE became our focus? What if we practiced LOVE, throughout Lent?

As we prepare for Easter by repenting, giving alms, practicing self-denial and engaging with other aspects of Lent, what if we focus on having love in our heart? If our focus – and our goal – through Lent and in life is to love God and to love others, as the famous song says, ‘what a wonderful world this would be…’

Written by JONI BOYD