All My Muchness
I went down a rabbit hole during my quiet time the other morning.
I happen to be a huge fan of rabbit holes, and I blame my deep love of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice has stood by me in my hour of need for lo these many years, and I think it has a lot to do with having grown up in a country where I was head and shoulders above most normal sized people. There were times when I wished that a bite of cake or a sip of cordial would make me grow smaller, even if only for a few hours at a time.
Anyway, I happened to be reading the verses referred to as the Shema in Deuteronomy 6, and I snagged on the fact that—even though I had just had a conversation the night before with Twinkle about loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength—“mind” was not listed in Deuteronomy.
(Hang in there with me—this is going somewhere, I promise—as is the aside about Alice.)
Anyway, being a happy little nerd, I dug a little deeper. It turns out that the verse I was thinking of during my chat with Twinkle was actually Jesus riffing on the Shema in Mark 12. It’s here that Jesus adds “mind” into the list of ways we are supposed to love God. But it isn’t the only time Jesus switches up the list. In Matthew 22, he lists heart, soul, and mind, but doesn’t include strength. Initially, I had a moment of going, “Is Jesus misquoting the Scripture?” But then I realized, what he’s doing is actually making sure that we’re getting the point of what was originally said.
We’re supposed to love God with all of ourselves. Nothing is getting left behind.
And somehow, this led me back to Alice.
As I sat with Deuteronomy 6 (and Matthew 22 and Mark 12), I found myself thinking about how Lewis Carroll has the Mad Hatter say to Alice, “You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more… muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.” And I thought about how perhaps what God was saying to me was that what he wanted was for me to love him with all my muchness.
That means loving him with my inquisitive mind that enjoys rabbit holes. And I think that’s some of what I’d been saying to Twinkle the night before: are we stretching our minds so that we can love God more or are we content numbing them with easy entertainment? But it was also much more than that.
As I turned that idea over in my mind—that God wants me to love him with all my muchness—he took me back to Indonesia, where I had so often felt out of place and overlarge. He wanted me to love him more than I wanted to not block someone’s view in church. He wanted me to love him more than my attempts to shrink myself small while taking public transportation. He wanted me to love him more than my desire to be able to go shoe shopping and find shoes for my ski sized feet.
And then gently, he reminded me that my muchness also includes my mental health, the areas where I sometimes feel far less than I should. He wanted to use my years of depression as a catalyst for more love. He wanted me to turn my moments of anxiety into opportunities for worship. He wanted even my exhaustion to be a part of the depths of my love for him.
He wanted not just the areas where I felt like too much but also the areas where I felt like too little.
I spent the last week with the Man’s family, celebrating the life of his twin. So the Man’s twin, Jonathan, was also on my mind as I turned over the idea of loving God with all our muchness. Jonathan couldn’t say much, especially toward the end of his life, but he could (and did!) remind us that Jesus loved us. He could (and did!) give great hugs. He could (and did!) belt out the biggest belly laughs. Jonathan loved God with all his muchness. And I know he’s now continuing to do so in heaven.
I thought of my father-in-law who has consistently gone in to work, fought through periods of unemployment, even held down multiple jobs at times, so that my mother-in-law could stay home and care for their firstborn son. I thought of my mother-in-law who spent almost 41 years changing diapers (and eventually ostomy bags), learning nursing skills for which she’ll not receive a degree, doing hard work day in and day out so that Jonathan could be in his own home where he was loved and seen (and she also homeschooled her four other kids at the same time). They have both loved God with all their muchness.
Life has changed dramatically for them this month. Loving God with all their muchness will look a little different from here on out.
I think sometimes we have these grandiose ideas of what it really means to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. We might think of Billy Graham or Jim and Elisabeth Elliot or Amy Carmichael (at least those of us who grew up in my mother’s home are thinking of her good friend Amy). But today I want to remind you that the character whose muchness made the most difference in Wonderland was not the Red Queen, for all her noise and bluster, power and charisma.
No, it was Alice. A little girl who couldn’t stay the same size from one moment to the next. A little girl who was both too much and also sometimes not enough.
Today I’m reminding myself that really loving the Lord means giving him all of me: my worries about the state of the world, Tiny’s Latin homework, my dining room table covered in Twinkle’s nail salon, our crazy pets that insist on dumping plants at six in the morning, the oldest son who for some reason decided to sleep on the couch last night, my sore muscles, the plans I make that then get remade, my writing that doesn’t happen as regularly as I want, Bee’s laugh from the other room, the To Do lists I make that sometimes stall for months at a time, my love for my husband, Bruiser’s exuberance…. The list could go on.
All of these things are part of my muchness.
All of these things must therefore be catalysts for love.
When God looks at me, he does not think of me as either too much or not enough. But he does call me to love him…with all of my muchness.
