I’ve never been good at math, so I tend to keep my equations simple. My kids are studying algebra 2 and geometry, and I’m all tapped out. I got nothing.

But there is a simple equation I re-discovered this week that works even more fundamentally than those hard-to-memorize calculations from math class. It works tremendously with people; in fact, you could call it the equation of love. It looks something like this:

Time + money = love

                In my case: $5 + 90 minutes = act of love to bless someone else

Five bucks was how much I spent at Price Rite for a 10lb bag of Idaho potatoes. Ninety minutes is how long I spent peeling, cooking, mixing and mashing said potatoes (with my own original recipe of 11 herbs and spices, of course). Love is what I experienced and displayed as I took the pan of mashed potatoes and gave it to the servers preparing the food for an outreach dinner held in our city of York by a church we are closely connected to.

 What was extraordinary was how I felt like I was handing over my loaves and fishes, and out of it was coming a far greater amount of practical and expressed love than I could have imagined.

Jesus once said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” What is most important to you is what you love most. What we love shapes who we are and what we are striving to become. When we take our time and money and invest it into building the Kingdom of God and loving other people, we are living out the equation of love.