09/26/2026
LOVE COMES FULL CIRCLE
Last night was called Love Comes Full Circle.
And this morning, I began to see just how long that circle may have been forming.
I was sitting at breakfast when I heard a song playing faintly somewhere in the room.
The Living Years by Mike + The Mechanics.
I almost missed it.
And then I realized what I was hearing.
A song about a father and a son.
About relationship.
About things left unresolved and words left unsaid.
And my eyes filled with tears.
Because father wounds had unexpectedly become such a tender part of what God was doing in the room last night.
I sat there trying to take in the beauty of the connection.
And then, almost like someone gently pulling on a thread, other songs began coming back to me.
I saw myself as a little girl standing in our driveway singing We Are the World, imagining people all over the earth holding hands.
Even then, something in me seemed to know:
We belong to one another.
Love matters.
And then there was Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All.
That wasn’t simply a song I remember from childhood.
It was one of the songs of my childhood.
I sang it over and over and over.
A little girl singing about learning to love yourself long before she could possibly have understood how deeply that idea would become woven through her own healing, her faith, and eventually the work of her life.
Years later, in adulthood, John Mayer’s Say became another song that stayed with me.
Say what needs to be said.
And sitting there this morning, with tears in my eyes, these pieces from completely different chapters of my life suddenly seemed to belong to the same story.
A father.
Words left unspoken.
Love for one another.
Learning to love yourself.
Finding the courage to speak.
Healing relationship.
And Love moving outward.
Before any of these memories began surfacing, I had already found myself praying in the hallway with the woman cleaning our floor, and later praying for a man from the kitchen staff and his grandmother.
Ordinary moments.
A hallway.
A breakfast room.
People I didn’t know yesterday.
And there was Love, moving outward.
Because Love always moves toward us first.
And that was when this thought came:
Perhaps The Hidden Commandment isn’t something I discovered recently.
Perhaps God tucked it into my heart when I was a little girl.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
We can move so quickly through those words.
Love God.
Love your neighbor.
But quietly nestled inside the command are two words we can almost miss:
As yourself.
And beneath even those words is the Love that comes first.
His.
The Love that moved toward us before we ever knew how to move toward Him.
The Love that sees everything and does not turn away.
The Love we do not have to earn.
The Love that finds the places in us that learned to guard, grip, strive, or survive.
And perhaps that is where the invitation becomes so simple and so profound:
Receive.
Give yourself permission to receive.
Because when we let Love reach us, something begins to soften.
What has been defended can begin to open.
What has been clenched can begin to rest.
What has been striving can begin to receive.
What has only survived can begin to live.
We begin to see ourselves through the eyes of the One who created us and has loved us all along.
And then Love does what Love does.
It overflows.
Into the way we see ourselves.
Into the way we love the person in front of us.
Into hallways and kitchens and conversations and ordinary moments that suddenly become holy.
Relationship with God.
Relationship with ourselves.
Relationship with one another.
Perhaps it should not surprise me that relationship sits so close to the center of it all.
God Himself exists in relationship.
Father.
Son.
Holy Spirit.
And the great story of Scripture is a story of relationship too.
Original design.
Rupture.
Redemption.
Restoration.
A God who keeps moving toward His children.
A God restoring what was fractured.
A God bringing us back toward what He intended all along.
Truth was never meant to remain something we only know.
Love was meant to land.
To move from belief into lived experience.
To reach body, soul, and spirit.
To restore what shame tried to fracture.
To remind us who God is, who we are, and how deeply we belong to one another.
Love comes from Him.
Love reaches us.
Love restores us.
And then Love moves through us.
This morning, sitting at that breakfast table, it felt as though pieces of my life that had been scattered across decades were suddenly sitting in front of me at once.
The little girl in the driveway.
The songs.
The wounds.
The healing.
The woman I have become.
The work I now carry.
Last night.
This morning.
All of it connected by a thread I could suddenly see more clearly.
Perhaps I wasn’t discovering a new message at all.
Perhaps I was seeing how faithfully God has been writing the same one through my life for a very long time.
Last night was called Love Comes Full Circle.
This morning, through tears at a breakfast table, I realized the circle may have been forming all along.
And perhaps the invitation has always been the same:
Receive.
Give yourself permission to let Love land.
And then watch what Love restores. 🫶
