Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 10:37 (NIV)
Where He Puts Himself
The Sunday call comes at four and it has been coming at four for nine years. Somewhere in the first ten minutes her mother will ask when she’s going to be done with all this, in whatever wrapping she has found that week, and she’ll say she isn’t, and they’ll go on to the weather and a cousin’s knee.
She loves her mother. She drives the three hours every second weekend and she has never once missed it, and she sits through the parts of that house that are hard to sit through. The call was forty minutes in 2019. It runs about twelve now.
Father, mother, son, daughter. Four people, and they’re the four a person would step in front of a car for without working it out first. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
Not worthy of me comes twice, for the parents and then for the children, so no one is left out of it by age, and both times it lands on the one who gets the order backwards. He doesn’t say love them less. He says where he goes.
There’s a relief in that for me. The order comes from above me, and I don’t have to manufacture a smaller feeling for my own people to get it right. What it costs is not felt in the feeling. It gets taken out of the ordinary traffic between people, a minute at a time, for years.
She makes the call at the same time. She says she isn’t done in the same voice she uses for the weather, because saying it hard would be a way of getting it over with. Her mother asks after the car.
A Prayer to Remember
Father, put yourself first in me, and do it where the loving actually happens, at a table and on a phone with somebody who wants more of me than I’ve got. I’m not asking to feel less for any of them. Set the order and hold it there on the days when keeping it costs me the people I’d rather please.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
