I don't have one freaking answer. Things are wrong, but I don't know the right. And while so many seem to be shouting it, I just can't quite place my finger on anything amongst it all that looks like Christ to me. The Christ. The Christ I met when I was 5. The Christ I met when I read the gospels.

The truest thing I've heard all week is this: God, reduce me to love.

And it's something I don't feel like quietly, gently whispering in prayer, it's what I feel I'm screaming inside with whatever passion and intensity this little girl has. God, reduce me to love! Where my thoughts and feelings and experience fail me, reduce me to love. Reduce me to love in action. Reduce me to love in the depths and secrets of my heart. Reduce me to a love that's potent enough to make things better. To change something. Even just one person's something. But I don't think what you meant by love would be able to stop there.

God, reduce me to love.

I haven't thought of myself as a fearful person, not since I was younger.  But suddenly, I hate the idea of fear in me.  Hate it.  God, reduce me to love! Love conquers fear.  And the idea of fear in me, means a resistance to love.

Christ gave us the ministry of reconciliation.  Yet all I see lately is division.  And I feel like my heart is getting torn apart as the disagreements grow louder and wider and angrier.  I don't think we are called to stand for nothing, to grow dim or dark or quiet.  A question has been rising in me this year: What am I responsible to stand for?  I've been realizing that to remain quiet, deaf and dumb is not to be a mature Christian.  But, I also know that Christ has given me the ministry of reconciliation. 

God, reduce me to love. 

I don't think we'll get anywhere, or accomplish anything but devouring one another until then. Change needs to come.  A lot of it.  And it's probably going to be pretty painful.   God, reduce us to love.