At All Costs

To be commanded to love God at all costs, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love Him.

- Frederick Buechner from Secrets from the Dark: A Life in Sermons.

In 1997 driving across the Jimmie Davis Bridge on my way to work, I was struck by this.  Not just struck.  I was moved, I was touched.  I was overwhelmed with the understanding of how and why I could have pure joy and love for my heavenly Father when my mother was 12 hours away dying a painful death.  I can't explain it.  I can't put words to it.  But this chapter in Buechner's book comes so close.

It was there, in that wilderness, that for the first time in my life I caught sight of something of what it must be like to love God truly.  It was only a glimpse, but it was like stumbling on fresh water in the desert, like remembering something so huge and extraordinary that my memory had been unable to contain it."  "I did not love God, God knows, because I was some sort of saint or hero.  I did not love Him because I suddenly saw the light (there was almost no light at all) or because I hoped by loving him to persuade him to heal the young woman I loved.  I LOVED HIM BECAUSE I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF.  I loved him because the one who commands us to love is the one who also empowers us to love, as there in the wilderness of that dark and terrible time I was, through no doing of my own, empowered to love him at least a little, at least enough to survive.  And in the midst of it, these small things happened that were as big as heaven and earth because through them a hope beyond hopelessness happened.

There are a few moments in time that I remember so vividly...the sounds, the sights, the smell, the feeling.  This moment on that bridge is one of those for me.

(You should read this whole book or at least all of Chapter 14.)