Catching On

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.

—1 John 4:7

In all of my scrambling to do the right thing and be the right person, I miss some of the most important things I think God might be asking me to do. For the last several years, I have been too busy for interruptions. I work and work on behalf of a good cause, at the expense of all the things I would see if I slowed down enough to look around my life. I wanted to be productive and useful and focused, and I turned into someone who was frazzled and scattered, and who could not bear the emotional weight of her own life, let alone someone else’s.

This week, listening to God and doing what it seemed like he was asking looked a lot like doing nothing, really. I changed plans and bought gifts and said prayers and made a little bed on the couch for my friend who needed a soft place for the night. There is nothing particularly noble or difficult about anything I did. I did the average things that needed to be done in the lives of the people around me. And I think I’m catching on to something that God wanted from me all along.