Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength
"And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment." (Mark 12:30). The first and greatest of all commandments outlines four ways in which we can love the Lord - with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength. What do each of these approaches look like? Our heart is the center of our feelings. To love God with all of our Heart is to feel a fullness of gratitude, awe, humility, reverence, and affection in our love for our Heavenly Father. Our soul is the center of our will. To love God with all of our soul is to courageously and humbly offer our will to our Heavenly Father, holding nothing back, but trusting Him with every last ounce of our will. To love God with all our minds is to be filled with curiosity and interest and to labor ceaselessly and tirelessly in learning more about our Heavenly Father and striving to understand His ways and comprehend His thoughts and to see the Earth and all of His creations and ourselves as He sees them. To love God with all of our strength is to serve Him and carry out His work and His glory to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. To come close to loving God in just one of these ways seems impossible, let alone trying to love with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strengths all at the same time. But we should not look at these four separate ways to Love God as hopelessly demanding. Rather, we should see this as an opportunity. If intellectually we are struggling to understand how a loving God can allow so much evil and tragedy to plague our lives, then for the moment, let's lay aside the mind and focus on loving God with all of our souls. Or, if we are struggling with complicated feelings of guilt and resentment and mistrust, then let us allow our hearts the time they need to heal and focus on losing ourselves in service and loving God with all of our strength. If we cannot find the will to obey God's commandments, then let us spend some time reflecting on how wonderful He has been in blessing us in so many ways that we don't even deserve. Our hearts, souls, minds and strengths are all intertwined and interconnected. The deeper we fill our hearts with love for our Heavenly Father, the more we will have the capacity to love Him with our souls, minds and strengths, and so on, for each of the four components. There are many ways for us to reach out to our Heavenly Father in love, and if we, for whatever reason, find that one or more ways are blocked, then we can focus our energies on the ways that are not blocked. I know that if we are half-hearted, half-minded, half-souled, or at half strength, we will only see half of the miracles that God has in store for us. But if we truly come to love our God with all of our heart, all of our mind, all of our soul, and all of our strength, then we will receive all the Father has.
