Mondays are hard to love.  The week stretches out long, feeling overwhelmed before it starts.  People stretch patience out long, and snap back disgruntled and tired, after the weekend.  Snow-gray skies stretch overhead, coloring everything dull.  But Jesus whispers “Love your neighbor as yourself…as I have loved you.”  This is where it starts, on Mondays, with the laundry and the to-do lists and the back-to-work routine.

Love isn’t brilliant or exciting on Mondays.  It is persevering. It is folding up carefully of shirts and tongues and moments, and offering grace.  It is steady.  It doesn’t rock off balance just because life does, or shift with the weather.  It is humbling.  It bends to wash dirty footprints on the kitchen floor, to answer the phone with a listening ear, to help with spelling words, to set the dinner table.

Love on Mondays is how we know for sure that this is for real: that God’s love is poured out in our hearts and we are changed because of it.  Love on Mondays is how we prove our love for Him and give thanks back to Him. Love on Mondays is the way to show the watching world that God’s love is big enough to change the world, one day at a time.

“Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him….For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.”  (1 John 5:1, 3)

“Loving means losing control of our schedule, our money, and our time.  When we love we cease to be the master and become a servant [of Christ].”  (Paul Miller)