Walking in the Way of Love

How to love well, when the world is falling apart

In the fourteen years that our daughter Ruth has been gone, this is the first year that I haven’t counted down the days to the date we lost her with dread. “You haven’t finished healing yet,” a friend recently said when I mentioned the deep ache of losing our daughter, who was just seven the night she slipped from us in her sleep.

Finished? I wanted to ask. How could I possibly be finished?

To live with grief, is to live without a finish. Without the end you imagined. The celebrations, the milestones, the million moments that will always be missing. And yet, this year we are celebrating new milestones, including our first year as foster parents, which has kept me—and the rest of our family—so blessed busy, there is no time to despair. Only the forward-looking hope that all will be well with the little ones now in our care.

How long they will be with us, we don’t know. What I do know is that we are God’s love delivery system. Each one of us. You don’t need to look far to find someone who is also hurting, someone in need of God’s love.

“I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy,” Jesus told his followers in John 15:11-14. “Yes, your joy will overflow! This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you.”

To read more about how God loves hurting, broken people through us, please check out my memoir, Redeeming Ruth: Everything Life Takes, Love Restores, available as an ebook and also in hardcover, with a bonus devotional guide for individual or group study.

This month, I am also remembering my dear friend Ken Carr, who died at 92 one year ago this month. Ken was a life-long optimist whose curiosity and determination led to inventions that have saved countless lives, including through the development of components for radar systems—one of which allowed the US to spy on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While others were stocking backyard bomb shelters, Ken led a ragtag team of colleagues to develop the tech to detect the threat of a nuclear weapons off American shores. Later, at at age when many people retire, Ken turned his attention to medicine, using the same technology to improve medical technology.

I was blessed to work with Ken to help him write his memoir, One Long Road: From Missiles to Medicine, chronicling a life lived well.

So this month, if you’re tempted to despair about the roiling world events, I pray that you will find your part to bring peace and hope and love to those around you. Or, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:2, “walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

None of us knows how long our journey will be or where it will take us, but together we can live and love well.

Award-winning author Meadow Rue Merrill writes stories to nurture the imagination, foster faith, and inspire a lifelong love of reading. Subscribe to Meadow’s Field Journal to join her writing journey—including upcoming books and essays. And find for her on FB and X.