Tracesoffaith

Jesus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30)

This is our greatest commandment. Its roots lie in part of a key Jewish prayer, the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and elsewhere). According to Jesus, we are to love our Lord with four components: heart, soul, mind, and strength.

For most of my life, I read that list quickly. I memorized Deuteronomy 6:5 as a young child. In my 30s, I learned of the Shema, and memorized the six verses using hand motions (my old brain doesn’t memorize as well as my young brain did). We should love God with all of ourselves, and teach our children to do the same.

Check.

When I started writing publicly in 2014, I began reading more widely. Partly to learn the blogging style, but mainly because a curtain had lifted. It revealed this amazing truth I still revel at – there are Christians who love Jesus just as much as I do, and hold very different political and theological beliefs. I don’t get to decide for all of Christendom how to vote, how to live for Jesus, or what church to attend.

That, my friend, is deeply humbling if you settle into it.

Other things kept jumping out at me as I wrote for tracesoffaith. Many of you have followed that journey from its earliest days, and I’ll forever be grateful for the people I’ve met through these online spaces. Some of you are real life friends and family, and the grace you’ve shown me as I’ve shifted in my faith, yet never wavering in my commitment to Jesus, has felt like the greatest kindness.

In those 11 years, I’ve read through the Bible chronologically in a year, I taught Bible Study to women and Sunday school to children, I served as a leader in my former church, I learned about contemplative spirituality, liturgy, church calendar, I stepped into a world of natural health that includes the ancient use of essential oils to help our bodies heal physically and emotionally, I joined the Catholic church.

Is your head spinning a little? I’m ruminating on a lot these days. Please keep me in your prayers.

Here’s what I’m coming to realize. The four components in the greatest commandment according to Jesus; heart, soul, mind, and strength, they aren’t one big run-on sentence. Each deserves intentional attention, and when I was Protestant, at least in the local church were I was serving, I was falling short on focusing on two of the four.

Maybe it was just where I landed, or what God had for me, or a masterful way of getting me to become Catholic, but I began longing for these other two qualities. Like starving, longing.

I love Jesus with all my heart. Not perfectly, and not without distraction this side of glory, but oh, how I love him.

I love Jesus with all my mind. My favorite pastime is learning, and I’ll forever enjoy studying the context of scripture, all the theology books and memoirs. What Beth Moore told me all those years ago is still true: “There’s a whole lotta Bible.”

There’s also a whole lot of church history and Tradition. That matters too.

So where I’m focusing these days are these two, soul and strength.

SOUL

What does it look like to read my Bible not just to complete it in a year, and study it like I’m running out of time? What’s it like to pray a psalm? To use lectio divine to place myself figuratively in a story of Jesus? To read the Bible in a lectionary format with thousands of Christians around the world?

How can I pray differently than the spontaneous prayers of my youth? Is there a way to have a conversation with God (the definition of prayer I grew up with) using the formal prayers of the church, or using no words at all?

What is it like to use essential oils before I read my Bible or pray, to settle my body, calm my mind, right my emotions, and better focus on my precious, quiet time with Jesus? Emotional support like Console, Peace, and Forgive?

As much as I tried, I wasn’t finding a way forward in these examinations in the local Reformed church I was attending.

STRENGTH

Another verse I memorized as a child taught me, “My body was a temple” (1 Corinthians 6:19), and for much of my life, I believed that meant I shouldn’t drink to excess or have premarital sex. Both of which are true, but again I began to sense it might mean more.

When the Israelites built first the tabernacle, then the temple, they used only the finest materials. The very best designers and craftsman used their talents to build what God had revealed first to Moses, then to David and Solomon. This beautiful partnership between God, man, and the earth’s natural resources.

I work at being more intentional about what I feed my body. I want to be strong enough and healthy enough to serve God to the best of my ability (with divine assistance) until my last breath.

I’m choosing natural products over medicine now, and the options available from God’s green earth are endless. My medicine cabinet has been completely replaced with supplements and essential oils. I feel better now than I did three years ago. The journey of loving God with my strength is just beginning.

Loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength is not a legalistic checklist but a lifelong invitation to wholeness. It’s a call to keep stretching, to keep noticing where love has grown deep and where it still waits to take root.

Maybe, like me, you’ve poured yourself into heart and mind for years. Maybe God is now whispering toward soul and strength—toward a different approach prayer, a slower breath, a body cared for as a sacred dwelling. Don’t ignore that nudge. Let it rearrange you. The greatest commandment is not only about loving more; it’s about loving fuller, until every part of you belongs to Him.