Love: A Map and a Destination
Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. Deuteronomy 7:9
When my husband was driving us to a new place, he often had a little uncertainty about how to get where we were going. He was an excellent driver, but map reading wasn’t his greatest skill. I became the navigator and had the job of looking to see when and where we should turn. It’s always a good idea to consider your destination and what direction to take to go there. It helps to have good counsel along the way. As I read God’s word, I use it a bit like a map and I try to go where God is leading. Years of study have led me to amazing discoveries of God’s faithfulness, and no matter where the journey takes me, I always see love as both the way to get where I should go and also, somehow, the destination.
Oprah Winfrey once asked the great poet Maya Angelou “What do you know for sure?” She said, “Love saves me and saves us all. It is more close to us than air, more loud to us than hearing. We can sit in it. Yes, love. I don’t mean romance or sentimentality. It can raise the dead. It can make a mountain move.” I celebrate this wonderful answer to a unique question. It gives me new words to express what I’ve learned about God’s love. Maya could have said a thousand other things, like “I know for certain that the sun comes up and then it goes down.” She could have drawn on any number of facts that have hard evidence, like people grow older and some trees shed their leaves. She went to a deep place to talk about something that matters desperately to all of us. She chose to go where she felt driven to go. She fastened her certainty onto love. That’s where we need to go, too. Let’s sink deep into God’s love and let it drive us there.