My mom loved kids.
She shepherded them in church, led the children’s ministry, taught VBS. She purchased shoes and clothes and backpacks for kids who went without; she kept an eye on the neighborhood kids when their parents needed to go to the store. She remembered birthdays as long as you lived—some of “Mom’s kids” got cards when they were aging into their twenties and thirties.
One of the memories that haunts me from the time of her death was the faces of parents who came to our house bearing casseroles and cards, knowing they would have to go home and tell their small children that their favorite teacher wouldn’t be back at church to teach them any more.
But one of the memories that blesses me came a few months after she died.
I received a call from one of her now-adult “kids.” “We wanted to do something for her,” he said, and explained that he’d conceived of a stuffed-animal drive for a local charity in need in her honor. “Are you okay with that? Are you okay with her name being on it?”
I said absolutely, and went about my day feeling cheered.
Imagine my delight and astonishment two weeks later when I received a slew of texted photos: an army of stuffed animals overwhelming my old home church. They filled the baptismal and the seats in the choir loft and every pew. They filled up the aisles. They sat around the alter and spilled out the door and obscured the careful flower arrangements.
Every single one had a red heart pinned to them that bore my mother’s name.
I don’t know that it’s possible to quantify the impact of a life of love. But I do know that there was something marvelous and tangible in seeing all those toys, a visible metaphor for the impact my mother had on life after life after life. I thumbed through the photos and I thought to myself, if I can ever be a person who even halfway loves this way, I’ll feel good about facing God.
But it’s never that easy, is it?
More and more it becomes evident to me that love requires the conscious and deliberate rearranging of the priorities and values of our lives in a way that almost always disadvantages us. In particularly desperate times, love can seem like a luxury—we don’t have time for that. Love can seem foolish. Love can seem wasted.
It’s been a challenging Lent.
I mean that literally. Challenges have filled my Lent, and not from fasting. In fact, it’s one of those periods—and I think all of us endure these periods—where it feels like everything we’re trying to do, or that we value or care about, is systematically being dismantled under our feet. Things I built are coming undone. People I care about are falling apart. Legacies I hoped to leave seem to be disintegrating in real time.
And there are so many paths to tempt us from what we are asked to do. Selfishness tells us to push our way through and get what we want. Self-righteousness tells us to dispense justice and punishment ourselves rather than wait on God. Darkness tempts us into despair and apathy and indifference.
The work of love is, so many times, the simple act of saying to all of those things “not today,” and then turning to get about the slow, incremental, steady work of the Kingdom knowing that it matters and ought to take priority in the face of everything else.
This is, many times, the opposite of immediately satisfying. It can feel slow and bogged-down, frustrating and beside the point. A lot of times love and service appear to take us in the opposite direction of the point. But God, we say, all this other stuff is going on.
Not long after my mom passed away, I found myself talking to one of her “kids.” He had been the recipient of one of her classics: a birthday card each year with a ten dollar bill tucked into it (a profound expense for her), long into his adult years.
“It’s a little silly,” he told me. “I mean—I had a full-time job! I didn’t need the money. Half the time I wanted to send it back because I thought she needed more than I did. But you know, that’s also what killed me every time. Like…she thought of me to do that and to make that little sacrifice. All those years, every year, she wanted to do that for me. And it made me feel like even if I didn’t matter to anyone else, I mattered to her.”
To make someone else feel that they matter means something. But more often than not, the actions that make others feel mattered can seem ancillary to our day—small, frivolous, even meaningless in the context of everything else going on. We mustn’t lose the plot.
The world will tell us otherwise, but to serve in every way we can (even in small and seemingly insignificant ones) is why we are here. We must not neglect it, especially now—especially at the times it seems the world is crumbling under our feet.
Samaritan's Song 