This week we are hosting our second group and things are going well. We’ve had a little bit of rain today but it hasn’t really slowed anything down on the house construction.

Over breakfast I lead a little discussion with our staff over the morning’s Bible passage.  A couple of mornings ago our daily scripture was Deuteronomy 6. During our talk I brought up the first sentance (which Christ later declares to be the greatest commandment):

Deuteronomy 6:5-9
“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

I asked our staff what it meant to love God with all of your heart, soul, and strength? What could that possibly mean; how could you love others (which Christ says is the second greatest commandment, Matthew 22:34-40) if you loved God with all you had? We came up with a notion that if you loved God with all of yourself then your love for other people/things would have to flow out of your love for God. But now I wonder what does that really mean, in practive?

At the time however I asked, as we are trying to wrap our brain around what it means to love with everything, if there had ever been a time when you had a purity of focus/concern/love for only one thing/person? Aaron shared about how one season while he was going to K-State he followed basketball super-close. He went to all the home games and was super excited that they were predicted to make the NCAA Tournament. But then as he watched the selection on TV K-State wasn’t chosen. He was so mad and had so much adrenaline flowing he went out and ran 9 miles (he was not exercising at all around this time and ached horribly for a week after the run). That made me ask if any of us had ever even had any adrenaline in any aspect of our relationship with God? No one responded.

As soon as I had asked the question about singular focus on an object I had a story in mind, but after Aaron shared I realized we didn’t have time to go into it and also I didn’t have how the story fit the commandment completely figured out. I knew the story shed light on what full devotion felt like, but I couldn’t quite get it into words at the time. So for the past couple of days I have been following the second part of the quote from Deuteronomy 6 about putting the commands of God on our hearts and thinking about them as we go about our tasks.

My story goes as follows. The last day of school my junior year of high school, I went out to lunch with three of my best friends. As we were leaving we decided to head back to my house, but I (knowing that it would be locked and I would have to let them in) said, “ok let’s go, but let me get there first.”
Smiles came across Rob and Joe’s faces and I realized we were going to have to race now. They were faster geting into their cars than Corey (who was riding with me) and I were. There were about three routes to get to my house, one of which (though maybe not faster) was only known to me and since I had to get ahead and it was hard to pass on 25mph roads I chose to take it fast and try to make up the time I needed.
Also, a side note, I was driving a rusty ‘86 chevy celebrity that was too slow in acceleration to go on the interstate and Rob and Joey were driving a tarus and focus. so this was not quite fast ‘n furious.
As I come up to the four way stop on 19th and Mic-O-Say Joe is already there and gives me this ‘Ha, I’ve won!’ look as he turns ahead of me. There is only three blocks (the last of which is a super steep hill that has a 90 degree turn onto my street) left so Joey’s confidence is justified.
But it ticks me off and I go into a mental gear that was (after the race) dubbed ‘Jake’s competitive mode’. I don’t know if I can quite explain it, but I just only had one goal, nothing else; I only cared about passing Joe and beating him to the house. Getting into a wreak or even killing Corey and I were only bad in that they would by default mean we lost out on The objective.
So I floor it, but as much as I loved the old celebrity when we came to the hill I was still only a 1/4 car length ahead of Joe and in the wrong lane (the turn coming up was to the right). I remember sitting up straight as I came to the hill to try to make sure that now one was coming up in my lane–again not for saftey, but to make sure nothing was in my way. I continue to floor it as we hit the hill and now that gravity is on my side I start to pass Joe. I see he is laughing and signaling that I can’t come over–he has me boxed out. The hill is ending fast, I don’t think I had even fully passed him yet, but I jump over to his lane and have to slam on my brakes to make the corner. Joey fortunately slams on his brakes too so we don’t hit and I am able to maintain enough control to not hit a wooden telephone pole as I round the corner while laying down a thick mark of rubber. I get to the driveway to see that Rob has already made it (we had all taken a different route) and Corey, after a stunned pause, is ticked that I drove that crazily. (And once Joey gets out of his car he is ticked too that we almost wrecked).

But I come out of ‘competitive mode’ slowly and the whole conversation doesn’t affect me much. It was a strange experience. Normally we have so many competing objectives in life (how do I do this, this and this well while staying safe, and also well liked by these people and these other people and while keeping my options open for the future and living up to who I expect myself to be…) That to spend 45 seconds with all of my heart rushing forward for just one thing…it was powerful. It was freeing. It was exhilarating. And when it was done I was, to my surprise, not upset that Rob had won; I wasn’t even that proud that I had beat Joe. What I did feel was this great warmth at having risked at things I didn’t know if I could do (when I jumped in front of Joe I really wasn’t sure we wouldn’t crash and I didn’t know if I could make the turn) and at having literally done all I could do–and knowing that for sure.

As I have thought back to this story about the car race, I have been trying to wrap my head around what can that show me about this idea in Deuteronomy 6. Obviously the race was a dumb goal and it was a stupid thing to risk Corey, Joe, and I’s health on. But what if God was the objective? What if my heart looked at everything with a single devotion to God. If I sat up in my chair, like i did at the crest of the hill on Mic-o-Say, looking only for obstacles to my goal of relationship with God, not caring if there was a risk of materials of safety. Would my whole life become powerful, freeing, exhilarating? Would I look back at the end satisfied that I had laid it all out?

I realize my whole life can’t be an adrenaline blur, and I’m not how exactly how to transfer to God that pure-will of the afternoon in May at 17. But it is a clue. And how exciting a thing it is to put the commands of God on our hearts, to think about them as we go through our days and to see that the truths we find in our experiences help us grasp the truths we read in the Bible. I am finding that Truth runs through goofy races as well as through Deuteronomy and we have a Great God who wants to teach us through both.

Will we take hold of Him?