How much do I love thee?

I have long been impressed with the slogan for Hallmark cards: When you care enough to give the very best. These nine words capture not only my thoughts about giving my best, but they strike an emotional chord about my caring.

In what at first seems to be a contradictory idea, G.K. Ches­ter­ton said: If something is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly. Chesterton was not suggesting that any old thing will do, but that whatever is worth doing should be done even if my best is only a poor second to what someone else might be able to accomplish.

Obviously, neither of these statements is Scripture. With tongue in cheek, I would say that both of them convey the truth of God’s Word. If I care enough, that concern will be manifested in the quality of my caring. And if something is deemed worthy, it demands all that I can give, even though my best may seem unworthy.

Translate Hallmark and Chesterton into our lives as Christians, and we see what a drastic difference it would make. Instead of the leftovers so often served up to God, we would begin to dip off the cream – to give God our best.

When I was a student pastor during seminary days, I received a call from one of our parishioners. She told me they had killed a beef for their freezer and wanted to give us some meat. Since we were living on a limited income, her call was welcomed.

She was cleaning out her freezer for their newly-killed beef and gave us several packages of steaks and some butter. When I got home and opened our care package, I discovered that the date on the wrapper of the steaks was almost two years old. Inside the wrapper, the steaks were yellow with freezer burn. Ann cooked the meat, but we ended up throwing it away. We could not bring ourselves to eat it. And the butter? It was so rancid we did not even try using it.

I thought, “Lord, how often have we given you the rancid leftovers – what we didn’t want?” And what if we were willing to do what we can, even if it wasn’t as good as someone else might do? Would that make a difference?

When our children were small, they gave me some of my most cherished gifts. One was a tree limb from which they had pealed the bark and written: To Dad, the champ. This was to be my bat when we played baseball (with a tennis ball) in the backyard. A second gift was another pealed tree limb (they seemed to like limbs) on which they had taped two old toothbrushes to make a backscratcher.

I still have both of these gifts. They are trea­sures, and their value lies not in the quality of the crafts­manship, but in the love by which they were given. They had given their best, poor by some standards, but precious to a father’s heart. God does not ask any more from us. But God does ask for nothing less than our best, as poor as that might be.    ~William B. Coker, Sr.