How Deep, How Wide

Some people knock on the door

Of our lives, come right in,

And make themselves at home in our hearts—

And we’re better—so much better—

for having them there.

                These words appear on the front of a card sent to my husband and me by Mary Lou, a woman in her 80s from our church, before we left St. Louis where we had lived all our lives.  It is a card I will keep and treasure.   Even more impressive is her reaching out to us during a miserable summer (2014) due to my ongoing health problems.  When Mary Lou herself was battling cancer and had to have her own assistant, she called wanting to help, bothered that she couldn’t come clean our house or do something else.  How impressive is that?

                “Making ourselves at home” in another person’s heart—and being allowed to do so-- are certainly part of the love Jesus meant when He referred to God’s love that should be “shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5).  This love, this fruit of the Spirit, is something we are commanded to live by:  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:31).  Preceding this, Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength: this is the first commandment.”

                How willing, how ready, how eager, are we to share this love, this Holy Spirit-breathed love that is patient, kind and available to all?  Do we make an opening in our circle of life to fit in someone new, someone who might need our friendship and encouragement?  The scriptures say a number of things about how we treat people who are initially strangers.  Hebrews 13:1 tells us to “let mutual love continue.  Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.”  A characteristic Jesus includes in separating the goats and sheep in Mathew 25 concerns “new people” when He says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed Me” (Mat. 25:35).  In that chapter, it is clear that “when we ignore the needs of those around us, we ignore Christ,” Gord Waldie, These Days devotional.

                Mary Lou, whom we only knew for about two years, now enjoys the loving presence of Jesus Himself in the place He prepared for us.  I will never forget her and the circle of love she opened to us making all our lives better.  May we draw ourselves into Paul’s prayer to the Ephesians that “the Father    . . . may strengthen (us) with power through His Spirit . . . so that Christ may dwell in (our) hearts through faith. And I pray that (we), being rooted and established in love, may have power . . . to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ . . . that (we) may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (3:14-19).