A Lump in a Shoe : An Illustration of Love

Years ago, a good brother shared a story with me that I would like to share with you. I hope that it will have the same impact on you that it did (and does) on me.

He told me about a mother who asked her young son to shine her slippers. He worked very carefully. He did a wonderful job. She was so impressed that she gave her son a quarter. (Remember, this was years ago.)

The next time she wore those shoes, she felt a lump in one of them. She pulled the shoe off and found a quarter with a piece of paper wrapped around it. On the paper, in her son’s boyhood scrawl, were these words:

“I done it for love.”

What a tremendous and touching illustration of the proper motivation for Christians! We can act without loving, but we cannot love without acting.

Hopefully, all who wear the name of Christ will approach our relationship with our Father and with others just like the little boy did with his mother. Hopefully, we will simply do what we’ve been asked to do and what we are able to do with a powerful motivation.

Hopefully, we can honestly say that we “done it for love.”

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing (1 Cor. 13:1-3, ESV).

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