In What Way is God Calling Me to Love

By Bernadette A. Moyer

I wish I could take credit for this question but I can’t since a dear friend shared it with me. What a great question though, “In what way is God calling me to love?”

I suspect at any given time the answer to that question can and will change just like we do. Looking back I can say that I was “called to love” my children. I was “called to love” a child that I birthed and twins that I co-parented with their biological father. I was “called to love” meaningful work that I did for causes like special needs children and religious retreats for youth and young adults. I was “called to love” the poor and the needy and to share not only my fundraising skills to help them but my own gifts of abundance.

Now that I am older I feel called to love and care for my two beautiful Bichon Frise dogs. And although I have always loved my husband I finally and fully embrace my “calling to love” him more and even better with humility and in gifts like a genuine desire to care for him. I am completely humbled by his love for me and my desire to love him. Simply put, I love loving him.

Throughout our lives we are presented with people and with numerous opportunities to show and to express our love. God calls us to love all people as He has loved us.

One of the greatest blessings in my life right now is the calling to marry couples in loving committed relationships. There is no happier time and day then the wedding day.  To be invited into their lives, to be the one chosen to officiate their most blessed and love filled day is beyond words. This calling feels so good, so right and truly God blessed.

In our lives we are called to do many things and perhaps our highest and greatest calling is in the ways that God calls us to love. The gift of giving, giving of one’s heart, soul and complete self in selfless acts of love has to be the most divine part of our human experience. Our souls yearn for love to give love and to receive love.

In what way or ways can you respond to, in what way is God calling me to love? I suspect in order to even begin to answer this question we must first pull back the layers, expose our vulnerability and identify what that true inner voice is asking us to do.

In closing from Maintenance to Mission by Robert S. Rivers, CSP the following quote;

“Vulnerability may be understood as the capacity to be open, to be attracted, touched, or moved by the draw of God’s love as this is experienced in one’s own life or in the lives of others. It is vulnerability that enables one to enter into relationships of interpersonal communication and communion with others who recognize their own weakness and need. Vulnerability requires the integrity and the strength — indeed the power— to risk enormous pain, to bear the burdens of the darkest hour without avoidance, denial and deception. It demands the stamina to be open in order to be touched in one’s fragility. Vulnerability implies a willingness to lose oneself, to be kicked off center by the claim of the others upon one in the hope of finding one’s true self. It demands readiness to die to one’s self so that one might truly live.”