How do I love YOU?

Mark 12:30:30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Mark 12:33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."

Psalm 48:9-14 - 9 Within your temple, O God, we meditate on your unfailing love.
10 Like your name, O God, your praise reaches to the ends of the earth; your right
hand is filled with righteousness.
11 Mount Zion rejoices, the villages of Judah are glad because of your judgments.
12 Walk about Zion, go around her, count her towers,
13 consider well her ramparts, view her citadels, that you may tell of them to the
next generation.
14 For this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end.

I was reading my Bible reading and these two sets of verses spoke to me. In Mark we read that the greatest commandment is to love God with everything. But I like how the religious teacher repeated it back - love God with all your understanding. Understanding. How do we love God with our understanding? This, of course, is our mind. But I intellectually I love God because I get how great and wonderful He is.

To love God with my understanding, I need to know Him. Not know about Him but really know Him. Talk to Him, listen to Him, read about Him, allow Him to become apart of me and me to become apart of Him.

Then I read Psalms and it speaks to how to know Him. V.9: mediate on unfailing love; v.10: praise Him, recognize His being throughout creation; v.12-13: walk around Him and get to see Him as He is; v.14: allow Him to be my guide.

When I go on vacation, I take alot of pictures so I can capture the memories and have something to go back and look at. I love seeing pictures of the Neuschwanstein Casatle in Germany (the one that Disney copied) because it reminds me of the time I spent there - it is "rememory". How am I going to remember God or tell about Him to my grandkids if I don't capture Him in my mind (and my heart). I need to study Him so that in the dark times I can remember His personality, His goodness, His promises, His fulfilled promises!

Then I read Phillipians 1:9: And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight

Father, I want to KNOW You - but more than that, I want to experience You. I want You to infiltrate my life completely...but only I can allow that. You won't force Yourself or push Yourself on me. I must be open and active in letting You fill me.

You are so good, so perfect, so holy, so big and yet so personal.