“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” I was thinking about why the Lord would detail three separate ways that we may show our love to God. We can love Him with our heart, our soul, or our mind. Why not just say “love God” with your whole being and be done with it? I believe that the Lord made distinctions so that when we are struggling in certain areas of our life, we still have options to obey the first and greatest commandment. Of course, it's best if we love God always with all three parts of ourselves, but if we are just too emotionally overwrought and our heart is broken and we can't dredge up a single loving feeling in our hearts, then we still have the option to strive to love God with our mind and remember all of the good things He has done for us and to lay out logically why it is still in our best interest to make the effort to love God with our mind, even if we can't temporarily love Him with our hearts. And by the same token, if we are trapped inside the logic of our own minds and can't reconcile an all powerful and all loving God with the unspeakable tragedies that He seems either willing or careless to permit, then we can set aside for a season the requirement to love God with our mind and instead focus on loving God with our hearts. And for those times when God's love and mercy for us passes all understanding and is too much for us to bear such that our minds can't comprehend and our hearts can't contain His love for us or our love and gratitude for Him, then that is when we can still love Him with our soul in a way that words and thoughts can't describe and feelings can't express. I'm grateful for the opportunities that I have to love God with my mind. I love learning more about Him and His words and the infinite and varied ways that He can be discovered through all of His creations. I’m grateful for the opportunities that I have to love God with all my heart. I love the feelings of awe and wonder and joy that come into my heart as I see Him work miracles in my life and the lives of those around me. And I'm grateful for the opportunities that I have to love God with all my soul. I love being able to pray and communicate with God without words, just my soul to His soul. Sometimes I'm lucky to be able to love God with my heart, soul, and mind all at the same time. Sometimes I have to be content to love God in an imperfect and incomplete way. But I know that as we persist in loving God in whatever capacity we are able, we will find that our capacity to love with every single part of us will grow.
