Costly Love - Lent, Day 31
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”—JOHN 13:34-35 (NIV)
Reflect
The thing about love is the cost. I met someone really special over the pandemic who taught me about love’s cost. She is a professor of nursing named Christie Watson, and she risked her life every single day during the height of illness for the sake of others. She wasn’t planning on having her schedule upended, her courage tested, and a flurry of fears about bringing disease back into the home with her worried teenagers. Costly love goes beyond what we think we can afford. But it was the love between Christie and her patients that sustained her. Because that’s the other thing about costly love—at its core is love. In it we see the reflection of God.
Respond
Where are you in the seasons of costly love—springtime (eager), summer (energized), fall (running on empty), or winter
(you might need a rest)? Ask a friend to help you figure out how to balance the cost and the love.
Blessing for caregivers
Bless whose whose love is service,
whose every urge is to keep going,
and not to count the cost.
And yet blessed are you,
beginning to notice that you are
slowing down, inexplicably,
or just pausing, staring for no reason,
or starting something,
but then quickly turning to another demand.
You who realize that you are beginning
to lose the thread.
Blessed are you who say,
I really can’t keep going like this,
at this pace, under this weight.
May there be steady hands
to sit you down
and keep you there long enough
for you to really feel what you feel,
and know what you know.
May there be wisdom
to trust that the community is
wide enough, kind enough,
effective enough to meet the needs
that are here—both yours and theirs.
May there be peace
that frees you to let
your hands lie gently open awhile,
the grace to just receive.
Seek the rest you need,
and a little bit more.
And breathe.37
37 Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie. Adapted from “For Caregivers” in The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days. (New York: Convergent Books, 2023). 96-97.
© KateBowler.com
SONGS FOR SUNDAY
Seek First
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfAusAxKaaE
Still God Still Good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMBKUz12sEU
Come Thou Fount
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bvYJL6WhuY
This I Believe