Love the Lord Your God with All Your Mind

Last year, when I was applying for the scholarship and Honors Program here at my college, I was required to write an essay about what it means to love the Lord with all your mind.  I think I took a little bit different turn then they meant for me to, but it was very well received.  There’s so much more to the mind than just academics and, though it may not seem possible, the mind is very useful for loving.

Loving people the way Christ desires us to strains us and drains us in a way that we can’t possibly recover from and do on our own without His provision and constant inflow of strength and power in our lives.  The determination to continue on despite the fear and disappointment, the quick thinking to deal with a sketchy situation, and the willingness to sacrifice sanity for the sake of children who have never experienced that before is only possible through God’s infinite love and power in our lives.  So I revised my essay to fit a decent blog post on the subject.  Romans 8:11 reminds us that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead lives in us and is redeeming us through His Spirit.

In Matthew 22:37, Christ tells us the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord with all your...mind”.  Two verses later, He commands “love your neighbor as yourself.”  While I could cite many examples of people who have lived these commands out in their daily lives, the example that comes to mind is my parents.

Before I was born, my parents ran a teen center in my hometown ministering to street kids who had nowhere else to go.  There’s one kid in particular that attributes some of his first experiences of God’s love to my parents.  He was one of those kids who was always causing trouble everywhere he went - he was even arrested in the lobby of the church when my parents brought him! The third and final time he was incarcerated, it finally clicked: all he’d learned about God as a kid was true and was truly for him.  He is now the outreach pastor at a local church and tells anyone who will listen about how my parents were the first ones to show him the love of Jesus.

Eventually, my parents felt God prompting them away from the teen center and toward becoming foster parents.  We had an impossible five-year-old with such deep issues that no one knew how to help him, teenagers that pelted us with rocks from atop the roof, and an eight-month-old with burn scars covering his face and broken bones throughout his body.  We had our last foster child - a premature infant born addicted to drugs – when I was in second grade.  That’s when my mom was called to go back to school and start a non-profit counseling agency for the broken people and families in our community.

From the mental strain of rebellious street kids, to the emotional toll of fostering and the heartbreaking stories of counseling, my parents have truly loved and served God and their neighbors with all their minds.  They may not always get to see the results of their ministry, but stories like those above keep them inspired to continue on and strengthen their minds through faith against attacks from the enemy.  God has given me many opportunities to live this commandment out in my life as well, and I believe that He will continue putting me into situations that will help better prepare me to take advantage of these opportunities and further my service to God and my fellow man more every day.