Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (NIV)
Because He Is One
The lab runs a night shift of one. He comes in at ten, when the phone stops, and works under a lamp with a loupe pushed up on his forehead. He took nights on purpose. A whole shift can go by without a word.
Tonight it’s a three-unit bridge for a man he’ll never meet. He builds it in layers, opaque underneath and the shades over that, matching the color against a photograph of two teeth still in the man’s head. Around two he seats it on the model and it drops in without rocking, first try, and that doesn’t always happen. He turns the model under the lamp and the match holds.
Israel is told to listen before anything else. Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Then Moses asks them to love the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their strength.
God is one. He is himself the whole way through, with no second office to petition and no department of him that handles the rain while another handles the crops. So the command comes at the size it does, all of a person, because Israel was answering all of God. What does a whole heart look like at nine in the morning, with four things already asking for it?
At this hour there’s one thing in the lab asking him for anything, and he gives it everything he has. Israel got this command for daylight, for a country they hadn’t walked into yet.
At six he pushes the loupe up and the whole lab comes back, badly lit, full of other people’s work waiting in trays. The bridge is finished and it’s good. The lamp had been showing him one small thing at a time. The light coming up outside shows him all of it at once.
A Prayer to Remember
Gather us, God, and make us one thing again. You are one, and everything you are is turned toward the people you called. We’re spread across a dozen small loyalties by breakfast and we call that a full life. Give us back the heart we keep lending out in pieces.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
