I asked God to let my family love him through my heart. I didn’t think of this as self-absorbed; it was a desire to be one portal by which my family might not just view but enter into a greater immersion within God’s love. 

I’m not a door. That’s Jesus, actually. I’m not even a way to the Door; I’ve written before that if Jesus is the Way, how could there even be a preliminary “way to the Way”?¹ 

Since recording my Weaker Brother Sessions interview with Full of Eyes,² the concept of an icon has been on my mind. Maybe my heart can be an “icon” for the ones I love: a window that looks into Heaven. Windows aren’t themselves ways to a vista; they’re simply one part of a wall that doesn’t stand in the vista’s way. 

Loving others is nothing if not a muddle—a mixture of motives and methods both as pure as we know how to muster, and as self-righteous as we weren’t able to overcome. Please hear the grace I’m trying to give our best intentions in our stumblings after this greatest calling: to love is our first, final, and possibly only real duty; it’s what we were made for. It might only naturally follow, then, that our daily successes and shortcomings are as varying as all the ways the day’s sky might show—or not show—the sun. 

I asked God to let my family love him through my heart. I want one part of the wall of the world’s pain and confusion and anger to break open through the way I love them. I want them to see the light of a real day in the place where my love for Jesus disrupts the impassible frustrations of it all. I want a breeze that becomes their breath to have its way in where my love is. 

I shouldn’t be surprised by this longing or scandalized by this idea. Haven’t they been an “icon” for me since I first loved them? Hasn’t loving them been, for me, the very crack in the wall that’s let in the brightest sunbeam?—not just the light that I can see, but the light by which I see?³ 

Maybe a sense of surprise at the rediscovery is due after all; it’s all only a rehearsal and reenactment of the most astonishing pageant in the entirety of existence. All the little ways we love are, in fact, that: “ways” that are part of the Way, himself; paths that join the great Path; streams whose very flowing gives evidence that there is a flowing Tributary for them all to join. Our loves are domains of degrees of resistance-less-ness to God-Is-Love. Every heart pigmented with Calvary’s tint lets in the light of the Savior’s hue.

Loving them is the stained glass window through which I see you; God, let my heart be nothing but the way my family loves you. 

1. Truth is a Person (A World with Christmases) ↩︎
2. 012: The Word and The Image w/ Christopher Powers (Full of Eyes) ↩︎
3. Inspired by C.S. Lewis’ “Meditation in a Toolshed, from God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, pp. 212-215.) ↩︎