I’ve just come back from a 2-week vacation and quickly I snapped into housecleaning/laundry/calendar mode.  September is just around the corner and I’m feeling ready to go!  I enjoy it when we are busy working but it was great to have some time to rejuvenate too.  My husband and I are the kind of people who will stay up however late and get up however early it takes to get things done.  I remember this summer  after several 4-hour long nights of sleep thinking about how the clock hands just spin round and round and I can’t ever say “Time out, please!  Can we stop the clock?”.

The number of things that can consume us are endless.  A job, family, school, a hobby–can dominate our thoughts, time and energy.

A couple of months ago I was having brunch with some women from my church and one of the older women was talking with us about how life can be so busy and hectic.  It can seem like we are pulled in fifty directions and feel impossible to juggle everything.  Then she said something I’ve thought a lot about.  Amidst all of those things that are going on in your life if you are Christ’s disciple, then “He has got to be… it.”

For so many it is the weekend, or family time or a special person, enjoying a little “me time”, maybe even getting a vacation.  But what she was saying is that nothing else in my life should ever come close to the Lord.  My priorities, my time, my money, my thoughts, my desires–all must reflect that he is it.

Last weekend we visited a church out of town and the pastor preached from Matthew 22:34-40 where the Pharisees try to stump Jesus by asking him which is the greatest command in the Law.

Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

Matthew 22:37

The pastor challenged me to think about how I love God.  I say that I love Oreos, the beach, pedicures, Disneyland, reading, naps, Food Network, and my husband.  Obviously I “love” them all differently and maybe need to curb my overuse of that word!  But his point was, in a list like that, how can I even follow all of those loves up with…”I love God”?

When Jesus says the greatest command is to love the Lord my God with all that I am , no other loves can ever come close in comparison.  I need to love the Lord with a radical love, where everything else is spinning around him as my priority.  Only then will the other things in my life be in their proper place… when God is it!