Ultimately, it’s about trying to live Christ’s two great commandments.
The Most Important Thing
In the last week of Jesus’ life, a lawyer1 asked Him a profound question:
Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22:36-40).
Pulled by so many demands and distractions, don’t we ask ourselves similar questions all the time? “There’s so much going on! Where should I focus? What really matters, here?”
If you believe in a God who loves all people as His children and does what he does for their happiness, Jesus’ answer is a simple and remarkable guide for life.
- Reach Upward (Love God with all your heart)
This is our vertical connection to heaven. God, as taught by Jesus Christ,2 is our loving father. He wants to be a part of our lives. He wants us to be eternally happy, and he wants to teach us how to live so that this joy is possible. Spending time with Him, learning from Him, and developing eyes to see things the way He sees them, bring peace, joy, insight, energy, and a greater capacity to love others, leading to number two… - Reach Outward (Love your Neighbor as Yourself)
This is our horizontal connection to each other. If God is our father, and we are all His children, we’re all family. We’re all on the same team. We all have an interest in each other’s happiness, and we already have deep connections between us that go beyond even our shared humanity and history. We have a shared parentage, shared divinity and a shared destiny. We have every reason to practice empathy, compassion, and service to our brothers and sisters who are with us in our journey on this earth.
The goal? Love More, in Both Directions
I want to create a space to honor both3 of these kinds of reaching. This is a place to invite anyone who wants to practice loving God to explore and build their personal connection with Him through the sharing of ideas, conversations, and tools I’ve personally found valuable. Naturally, this will be done through the lens of the faith that I practice and have found great peace and joy in.
It is also a place that will strive to exemplify loving and treating all as neighbors. We don’t have to believe the same things to be good friends. Public dialog is such a low bar, and we can do so much better. Instead of dismissiveness, listening. Instead of disrespect, validation of the reality of our experiences. Instead of gotchas over a misplaced word, grace and honoring intent. Instead of arguing to “win,” discussing to learn. And hopefully, instead of talking and calling it a day, taking action to bring more good into people’s lives each day.
A Technical Comment
The site logo at the time of launch is a set of joined hands over a suspension bridge – an analogy for living the two great commandments as explained3 by Apostle Gary Stevenson. The tie to the Golden Gate bridge is a nice (though incidental) Bay Area connection. Outward and Upward is admittedly backwards from the order of the first two commandments, but I did want to play on the English idiomatic phrase “Onward and Upward,” which has some beautiful historical usage4 in inspiring action to reach to new heights. Because of the need to keep these two in balance, I’m not worried about the swap.
Notes
- The optimist in me likes the account in Mark 12:28-34 better, where the question is asked in good faith and Christ tells the lawyer that he is not far from the kingdom of God. Mathew’s and Luke’s accounts do not show good intent behind the question, but we find a pearl in Luke’s account when Jesus explains exactly who our neighbor is by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-42). My kids love this story, and there’s a lot to talk about within it. Maybe we’ll discuss this in depth another time.
- Knowing something about who God really is is foundational to any of this making sense. Loving God with all your heart, soul and mind would be insanity or slavery if God were a tyrant, an unfeeling force of nature, or a cosmic tinkerer with distant playthings. John recorded Jesus as saying that “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3). In another of my faith’s books of scriptures, we read of God explaining: “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39), and a prophet declaring “Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 25:25). God really, really wants his children to have a relationship with Him and to be happy eternally.
- Apostle Gary Stevenson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compared each of these commandments to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in an April 2024 sermon. It’s worth a read or a listen.
- I didn’t want to inappropriately use this quote by inserting it directly in the post, but do check out Mary Church Terrell’s rallying speech in defense of voting rights for african-american women (along with all women) in 1898. The incredible closing line I’m referring to is: “And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long. With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope. Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.”