I was part of the flannelgraph generation. Every Sunday, until I was deemed old enough to sit in service, I would go to a windowless basement room in our church building to hear a Bible story played out on two-by-three feet of cardboard covered in green flannel. Our teacher pulled flat, felt people and animals out of a box and carefully assembled them on the board. It was here I heard the tale of Noah’s escape from the flood, of boy David’s victory over the fearsome Goliath, and of the deep, dark chasm of sin separating us from God himself. I was a child of the ʼ80s, and this was the way.
On a good day, I was chosen to help. The Sunday School teacher would narrate the lesson as my fingers gently moved the figures from one side of the board to the other. I am not sure whether I cared more about getting the story right or soaking in the honor of being the one to move the pieces. Either way, I held my breath as if standing next to that flannel-wrapped board were sacred.
I recently heard a friend mention her “vertical relationship with God and horizontal relationships with people” and something about that description of community took me back to those flannelgraph days, back to the room that always smelled of chalk and animal crackers. But what emerged was not nostalgia. A wave of unrest passed through me as an image of a cross lined in pale-blue felt surfaced in my mind. I don’t know if it was a memory or an amalgamation of Bible stories told on flannel boards, but that cross, with its beams reaching upward and outward, stood front and center in my mind.
Unlike the softness of the flannel, something about that cross felt sterile.
It was a little too neat and tidy with its lacquered planks of loving God and loving people intersecting only at one point. The rigidity left very little room for nuance, for the ways most relationships bend or splinter.
Community is rarely so straight and clean, and I left the conversation unsettled.
For days I sat in my discomfort with the analogy, with the idea that loving well had a distinct direction and separateness with very little overlap. I questioned whether the cross (despite the sacredness of that symbol across Christendom) was really the best way to illustrate the kind of connection God had in mind when his very hands formed the first person out dust and out of his own breath breathed life into his body.1
Jesus himself inhabited a body, the earthly and eternal housed in flesh. There was no point at which the Son of God ended and his body began. His humanity and his divinity were all wrapped up in each other, and the same was true of how he loved. In Jesus, there was no hint of separateness, no severance between his love for the Father and the crowds who came near just to touch him. Rather, he sat down at tables, leaned in, and let us all in on the secret: “Loving well is loving all.”2
That thought landed differently in my soul. Love is not a mission or an item on a to-do list, but a way of being in and relating with God and the world.
The flannelgraph-version of the cross fell short of the kind of communion God imagined.
The image had a distinct directionality and rigidity about it, where loving God “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” was nearly detached from “loving your neighbor as yourself.”3 The message was anything but invitational and carried a rather heavy layer of guilt. In my gut, I knew the analogy wasn’t right.
If “loving well is loving all,” then our relationship with God and each other do more than intersect. They do more than hold hands or sit adjacently on a shelf. They’re knit together. The relationships dance to the circular language of Jesus, who prayed for a people so wrapped up in “I am in them and you…in me” that knowing where loving God begins and where you end and where I start all over again becomes blurry.
It is a love that does not separate but intertwines.
In elementary school, my Grandma Dottie—a sassy lady who always met me with a hug and an oatmeal cream pie—taught me how to crochet. She sat beside me with a skein of yarn and showed me how to hold the metal hook and let the strand gently slide through my fingers. I stitched together long chains, looping back and forth until what emerged (for the most part) was a scarf. And while I loved holding up the finished product, it was the weaving that felt like welcoming.
When I think about what it looks like to love like Jesus, for love to loop in and under and over, that image looks a lot less like two straight lines crossing only at one point and more like that skein of yarn—one continuous strand wrapped up in and around each other, its softness inviting us into more. Sure, it’s much harder to see the depth and breadth. There’s more opportunity to get tangled. (Yarn is much less tidy than flat images on flannelgraph boards.) But if we stand a chance of life “on earth as it is in heaven,” to know and be known in the way our souls crave, we cannot segment love and expect it to be whole.
Loving well is loving all.
A Quick Note:
Today’s essay wraps up my summer series on “Barriers to Belonging.” I’m taking this coming Monday off to enjoy the Fourth of July holiday with my family, and after that, we’ll get back into our normal rhythms of a (much less wordy) letter and a good list of things to pick up, followed by an essay to end the month.
I respect your inbox (as well as my human capacity) too much to send out quite so much content every Monday, so I hope returning to this rhythm will be welcomed by us all.
In lieu of next week’s newsletter, I invite you to come join me on Instagram for a somewhat spontaneous Liturgy of the Little Things Challenge. I usually lead this practice during the month of November, inviting us to find goodness and stir up gratitude, but I thought we could all use an extra dose of beauty and goodness right now. We’re doing a shortened version of the challenge through July 3, and I’d love for you to join us.
Genesis 2:4-24 captures the story of the creation of mankind.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus talked about how interconnected our love for God and each other is meant to be. But if you’re looking for a few specific stories, I suggest Matthew 25:31-46, John 17, and the Sermon on the Mount (beginning in Matthew 5).
In Matthew 22:34-40, we find the story of when the religious leaders of the day asked Jesus which commandments from the Law were the greatest, and Jesus told them that everything hinged on love.
Conversation today with some brothers about what it looks like to “sow in the spirit” and some of the clearest examples I can find in this exhausting and weary season is just loving my kids with whatever patience and kindness and long-suffering the spirit provides…and pleading for more. It’s amazing how that ”sowing” would not register on the “Christian service” checkboxes I grew up with in church.
I appreciated your perspective in discussing what you learned from those flannel boards. I was also an 80’s kid, but wasn’t raised in the church and had NO idea what a flannel board even was until I was almost an adult. It’s important when we are having conversations like this for words like “love” to be defined very clearly. From the studies I have done, what our current culture defines as love looks very little like the love Jesus was talking about in the commandment to “love God and love others.” I wonder if you could define love in a subsequent post? Maybe you have already, and you could direct me to it?