You take good care of her.

My husband & I, and Jack in his black cowboy hat beside his beloved wife, at Sinaloa Cafe, our favorite Mexican restaurant in Morgan Hill, CA.

“You take good care of her,” Jack used to say to my husband as he left the bar of our favorite Mexican restaurant. Jack and his wife were regulars at that restaurant, the same as my husband and I. We often sat near them at the bar and chatted familiarly. He wore a black cowboy hat that stood out brightly against his white hair. His voice was a little raspy; maybe he had been a smoker. During the pandemic, Jack’s wife died. We discovered later, when things freed up enough for us to return to the restaurant, that the staff used to sneak Jack in on Tuesday nights during the lockdown so he could have some company while he ate. We started going to the restaurant on Tuesdays sometimes so that we could be company for him, too.

We would ask him about his adult kids and their kids, his grandchildren. And we loved it when he’d get into a reminiscing mood and talk about life in the small Northern California town where he and his wife raised their kids. When he left, he put his hand on my husband’s shoulder. With his voice cracking and eyes welling up, he said, “You take good care of her,” as he looked at me. I would get all choked up myself.

I thought of Jack recently when I heard an Easter meditation on a podcast (episode webpage). The speaker, Gareth Higgins, urged us to reconsider our approach to Jesus' command to love others. You probably know that Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40). I always thought of them as commandments, as Jesus said they were—instructions to love God and others. That’s true, they are. However, in the meditation, Higgins asked us to think of them as instructions to others about ourselves. Like Jack’s instruction to my husband, “You take good care of her.” Try it—imagine yourself in each of these scenarios and substitute your name.

I imagine myself sitting on a hillside beside Jesus, as I often see him when giving the Beatitudes. With me beside him, his arm around me, facing the crowd, he says, “Love her with all your heart.” Or Jesus standing a little to the right and behind me, with a hand on each of my shoulders, saying to the others in the room, “Love Mavis. Be kind and take care of her just as you would like to be loved and taken care of.” Or even, Jesus kissing me on the cheek and saying to my family and friends, “Don’t you just love her? Be sure to take good care of her.”

When my friend was dying of ALS, she sometimes fretted about being worthless, a burden to everyone who had to do everything for her. I told her her only job was to be a vessel of our love and God’s. Her job was to receive God’s and our love. That’s always all of our job. Often, we also strive to demonstrate God’s love through our actions. But always, even if it feels like we cannot do anything else worthwhile, we receive God’s love.

Higgins called it being the object of God’s love in addition to its subject. How does it make you feel to imagine Jesus instructing others to love you as they would like to be loved? I hope it makes you feel the way I did when Jack told my husband to take good care of me—touched, warm, loved. You are God’s beloved daughter or son or child. He instructs the rest of us to love you, too. God loves you, and so do I.