A Call To Love

I’d been away for four days. Four days of clean hotel rooms, convenience and perfection around every corner, freshly made beds. Oh, the beds. So white and puffy you sank down deep and snuggled without a care in the world. When I came home to the middle of a kitchen renovation – dirt and dust and all our kitchen possessions spread over every square inch of our floor, my brain could hardly comprehend it all. And in my post-travel exhaustion I climbed into our unmade bed, covered in clothes and cats and crumbs from someone’s snack.

I didn’t handle it well.

Any joy and thankfulness I felt in my heart for my family was immediately overshadowed by my sighing, my anger, and my frustration. I kicked something out of my way and as it clanged across the kitchen floor I could see my husband’s shoulders drop. All of his hard work on a project that I’d asked for – that he researched and taught himself how to do because there was no other way to afford it – and my anger discounted my gratitude. All the words I said about how great it looked, how much I appreciated his time with our daughter while I was away, none of it mattered when my actions said “disappointment.”

It’s something I struggle with on a daily basis, the hard work of my actions matching my words and my family receiving the best of the encouragement I have to offer. So often I’ll spend my day pouring out online, investing in the hearts of women and then when the computer is closed and my work day is done, there’s nothing left. And when I ask God what He wants me to do next – is there a book, a project, an event – what is it that He wants for me? He whispered this softly to my heart:

Love them.

It’s a call to the greatest God-sized dream I’ve had yet. A call to love. To spend a season focusing on loving my family well first. To wake up each morning and make putting on love a priority:

“And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Colossians 3:14 ESV

It’s a call to love the women in my life who are doing the brave work of motherhood, the ones who are pouring out their stories in books, the ones who are leading and serving and ministering and counting the cost of it all. It’s an Ephesians 4:1-3 commissioning, to “walk worthy of the calling you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, accepting one another in love.” It’s laying down the frustrations and selfish desires of my own heart to say “what can I do for you?” instead of “what can you do for me?”

Let’s walk in love today, friends.