A Vision for Loving Well

Oh the challenges we face when caregiving. Jen Pollock Michel gives a perspective we need for all of life. 

Elisa

A Vision for Loving Well

By Jen Pollock Michel

In the summer of 2021, our family was still living in Toronto. We were landed immigrants, with all the necessary paperwork to stay. We finally owned a house in which to finish raising the last of our five children. It wasn’t a time to be leaving a place we loved. But as we emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear, after a Stateside visit, that my mother was suffering severe cognitive decline.

Since the death of my brother twenty-five years earlier, I have been my mother’s only child. I understood that care of all kinds would be needed as my mother’s dementia—ravaging her memory and eroding her executive functioning—progressed. There would be need for financial help, medical care, emotional presence, and practical problem-solving.

This was a responsibility I could not ignore as I tried living in faithful response to the voice of the God who, according to the last words of the Old Testament, turns the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents.

How could I love God if I could not love the neighbor who was my mother?

In our three decades of marriage, I don’t know that a decision has been clearer. Honor your father and mother. It helped, of course, that God also rained biblical proverbs from the sky, each of them landing with brute force: “Don’t despise your mother when she is old,” and “What a pleasure to have children who are wise,” and “May she who gave you birth be happy.” The clarity was real—but this isn’t to say that the decision was easy, nor the responsibilities that followed. What’s mostly true is that I obeyed God, on the level of the public decision, and continued to struggle with resentment and anger in my heart. I was angry at my mother for the many ways I perceived her failures. I resented that she would never acknowledge our sacrifice.

After our move, I leaned on my rule of life—this practice of regular habits to sustain creative faithful response to God’s loving voice—to articulate specific ways in which I would try loving her well, even when I didn’t feel like it. I planned weekly visits, monthly day trips, Sunday lunches. Dutifully, I showed up to these habits, though I quickly realized I needed to expand my rule in ways that captured a more beautiful vision, even a more holy desire for a transformed heart toward her, where forgiveness would displace resentment, and honor, contempt.

A rule of life isn’t meant for crafting the “designer” life. Its aim isn’t to curate a schedule that serves our comfort and convenience. Our personal, written rule, guided by a vision of Jesus and Jesus’s kingdom, calls us instead to concerted efforts of love.

In later revisions of my rule, I added language to conceive of the future good God might do in and through me. As I visited my mom, I wanted God to “let me love well this one who suffers,” to “let me again and again choose love in each moment, so that through every small act of care and mercy the practice of love [could become] a liturgy and habit” by which a compassion might be formed in me “that cannot be learned any other way, save by the giving of myself in long service to another.” (From Every Moment Holy, Volume II, Death, Grief, and Hope by Douglas Kaine McKelvey.)

The language of vision became the text of my prayers—and the prayers, a way to constantly entrust myself to the God who always does more than we could ask or imagine. The vision provided by this prayer invited me to do more than practically serve my mother. I started to look lovingly at her. I started to walk slowly beside her and rush her less. I began hugging her and thanking her for being my mom. I began honoring her preferences, rather than imposing my will.

Each of us needs to see as God sees in order to love as God loves and act as God acts. A vision tethers us durably to the commitments of a rule, always reminding us of the eternal why.

In Dallas Willard’s classic book, Renovation of the Heart, he sets out the general pattern of spiritual formation, and it involves three elements. The first is vision. “If the vision is clear and strong, it will very likely pull everything else required along with it.” In a rule, we need a vision of the kingdom and a vision of the King. These will inform our choices and narrow our options.

To study the life of Jesus is to see what his rule in our own lives will look like. The kingdom is self-sacrificing, not self-aggrandizing. A rule will necessarily call for disciplines of silence and secrecy, especially when we want to trumpet our good deeds. The kingdom is merciful, not vengeful, and a rule will ask us to forgive, as we have been forgiven. The kingdom is small and humble, tiny and slow-working as a mustard seed. A rule will sustain patience and perseverance for every long, slow obedience.

Apart from Christ, we are blinded to a vision of God’s good. Apart from the help of Christ’s indwelling Spirit, we suffer the distractions of our age. Living in and from the love of God, we seek healing to see well, then live well.

The kingdom of Jesus validates the importance of every daily drudgery of love we would take up as a regular habit because love beats at the heart of God’s rule. Even the laundry can become a liturgy, as Kathleen Norris argues in The Quotidian Mysteries. There is no diaper, no dish, no deadline that is excluded from a holy kingdom purpose when the work is done in love.

Excerpted from A Rule for the Rest of Us by Jen Pollock Michel Copyright © 2026 by Jen Pollock Michel. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group, LLC. Used by permission.

Jen Pollock Michel is the award-winning author of five books: Teach Us to Want (Christianity Today's Book of the Year), Keeping Place, Surprised by Paradox (Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award of Merit—Beautiful Orthodoxy), A Habit Called Faith, and In Good Time (Canada's Word Guild Book of the Year Award). Jen is a sought-after contributor to publications like Christianity Today, The Christian Century, The Gospel Coalition, Mockingbird, and The Dispatch, among others. She is also a first-year mentor in Whitworth University's MFA in Creative Writing program, and she travels to speak at churches, conferences, and retreats. Over the past several years, she has been teaching rule-of-life workshops to hundreds of people across various life stages. The mother of five children, she is married to Ryan, and they live in Cincinnati, Ohio.