Everyday when I wake up, I’ve got this longing in my deep down heart. I want today to matter. I want it to mean something. I want it to count. I’m not content to just exist. To let life whiz by while I overdose on the narcotic of busyness. So, in my getting from one end of the day to the other, I want today to matter and I want to feel alive.

Yes, I want to feel life. Even the part that hurts. I want to feel all of it. Because even the hurting messy parts make me feel alive, and again, I want to feel alive. And I’m finding that I feel most alive when I see beauty. When I hunt for it and find it and then stand a spell and just savor it. And I think it’s because God made me and He is beauty. That is, He is Beauty embodied and so He lights up the world with reflections of Himself and sometimes we have to look for it, though it’s often just right there in front of our very eyes.

I also feel most alive when I create something, so here lately I’ve been in the habit of asking myself each day, “What do you really want to make today?” And I always have the same answer, though it sounds a bit strange and funny, but my answer is, “Well, what I actually mostly want to make is love.” And I don’t mean to make anyone blush, but poetically speaking, it’s true. Everyday, I just want to make love.

Because love is beautiful and love is good and in the end, I wonder if it’s the only thing worth making. And the poet in me wants to make something beautiful that lasts forever and the artist in me is delighted that I can craft love a thousand times a day in a thousand different ways. But the lover in me is finding that if I really want to make love, well, then I have to give my life away. And somehow, as crazy as it is, in the giving away, in the letting go and laying down–I feel most alive. And this is good, because remember, I want today to matter and I want to feel alive.

So, another day spins on and I don’t know if I’m really doing all the right things, but this I know. I’m finding beauty. Sometimes at the kitchen sink. And I’m glad that God reflects Himself here in my daily grime. That I can see Him clearly in the middle of the mundane, in the shadows and the light.

And I’m making love here by giving my life away. In the picking up of socks, and the scraping up of cheerios. In the bending low to look deep in little eyes and nurturing impressionable hearts. And in speaking words that help and heal into the lives of those I’m given.

And this is good. All this is very good. I do feel so alive.

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” (1 John 3:16)

“But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”(Romans 5:8)