Macro & Micro Love
It’s interesting how we measure love.
It starts with “I love you all the way to the moon and back,” and, before you know it, you find yourself texting your husband that you love him $20 worth of gas in the jeep gas tank. Incidentally, the Man’s gas tank overflows every .02 gallons if you don’t wait for it to gurgle all the way down first.
I’ve never listened so closely to anything in my entire life.
There are other ways that I measure my love for my husband (toothpaste on his toothbrush when I fix mine, a double batch of meatloaf with extra sauce, proofread emails on dodgy wifi during basketball practices) and ways that I measure his love for me (chocolate picked up at the shoppette when he’s already had a long day, holding my hand even when I’m hot flashing, prepping the French press before he goes to bed so that it’s ready for me in the pre-dawn dark).
He and I both know that these are the nitty gritty measurements of a bigger love that has chosen to do the hard work of keeping vows that rarely come naturally. When people talk about what ended a marriage, they mention the big things: irreconcilable differences, affairs, abuse, lost love. But often it’s these micro measurements of love that make or break us.
Realistically, the macro measurement—whether or not we’d give our lives for each other—doesn’t often come into play. I may not be tested on whether I love the Man enough to die for him, but I’m certainly tested on whether or not I love him enough to get off my rear and help him put on his dress uniform.
Because Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday collided this year, I’ve been thinking about macro and micro love in relation to God too. God loves us with a macro love—a love bright enough to burn our sins to ashes with the power of his sacrificial death. He loves us with His very life.
He loved us all the way to His own death so that He can love us all the way to the death of our sins. Burned to ashes and blown away so they can’t take up space between Him and us any longer.
Still, sometimes we get caught up in the macro aspect of God’s love and forget that He also loves us in the micro. He loves us with daffodil blooms and dog cuddles and unexpected rainbows and a body that, while it may not do everything we want, can hear vibrant music and see distant stars and taste the richness of coffee (or tiramisu or curry—pick your poison). We celebrate His macro love today, and hopefully every day, and then we choose to look for how He’s loved us on the micro scale.
And it works in the other direction too. Some of us think that since we have made the macro choice of having faith in Him and His ability to save us, once the label of Christian has been metaphorically slapped on our foreheads, the micro doesn’t matter. On the flip side, some think that since the big stuff is taken care of, we have to add as much of the little stuff as possible to show God how much we appreciate the gift of salvation He gave us or to kind of pay him back for the macro love we don’t deserve. Neither one of these hits the nail on the head.
Rather, because I love God and because He loves me, I don’t have to love Him with the micro, but I get to.
I get to love God a load of folded laundry. I get to love Him a meal for a family in need. I get to love Him thirty minutes of quiet prayer, a hug for a hurting child, a kitchen floor mopped with a cheerful heart. I get to love Him a patient response to the kid who is yanking my chain (or an apology when I blow it). I get to love Him by remembering that the person who treated my loved one poorly is also loved by God and made in His image.
I get to love Him $20 of gas in the jeep’s gas tank when my husband is too busy to get to the gas station.
I can choose to love God in the micro—and to look for how He’s loving me in the small ways too—because the micro measurements of love mean that the macro love isn’t just empty words.
We get to love Him because just look—really look—at how He loved us first.
