The Illustrated Mum - Jacqueline Wilson & Nick Sharratt

This one was a new one on me, and I have to confess, I was a bit nervous to read it.

It tells the story of Dolphin's mum, Marigold, who suffers from manic depression. The story follows both Dolphin and her older sister, Star, as they try to navigate their beautiful but complex mother who is not like any other mum they know, which is both wonderful and painful in equal measure.

Jacqueline Wilson is a master of this kind of topic - managing to melt the wildly difficult with the wildly beautiful. And it highlights many human truths, so with great difficulty I have picked just one for this weeks topic and it's this; people are hard to love.

It is true of Marigold and it is true of you and I. While I may not be hard to love in that same way Dolphin's mother is, I am, nonetheless, complex and flawed and that cannot help but seep into all areas of my life. Our frailties and sin bleed into the most beautiful of moments and there is no way of stemming their flow. What this story in particular highlights is that both the great and the terrible lie side by side in each of us. Marigold's delight in baking for her daughters is marred by the fact she bakes so many things and doesn't have any real food in the house, so her children are forced to eat raw cake batter for tea. She is beautifully creative which makes for a real talent for art, but she draws all over the birthday card Dolphin makes for her. She wants her children to be happy and have friends so she waits at the school gate and then accosts the most popular girl in Dolphins year and invites her to tea - the girls mother is appalled, and Dolphin pays the consequence the next day.

Marigold's illness digs deep into the brokenness that we all carry. And while I may not show it in the same way, my brokenness results in just as much mess. We are hard to love because we do not do what we should, because we let others down, because we are selfish, because we cannot see other people's point of view.

You will be hard to love today. You will find those closest to you hard to love in return. People in your family, people in your church, people in the supermarket. Dolphin and Star long for a life where they have food in the fridge and a mother who doesn't stay out all night. Where they can predict her behaviour and where they don't have to look after themselves and their mother. And yet they also don't want to leave her and live with someone else. They don't want her to change too much, or she wouldn't be their mum anymore. And it is this that makes it so, so difficult.

So what does the Bible have to say about this? How do we love the hard to love?

We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 1 John 4v19-20

What a wonderful Bible truth - God loves us, so we can love others. As difficult, broken, selfish and marred as I am, God still loves me because of Jesus. It's not that He doesn't know how broken I am, He is fully aware. But He loves anyway, because He can do no other. Nor does He just take all the lovely things I do and focus on them at the expense of the bad stuff. No, there is nothing good enough that I could do to turn His head in my favour. He loves me just because He does.

And this has far reaching consequences. it is BECAUSE He loves me that I can love others - difficult and painful as that might be. It was costly and painful for God to show His love too. It is in remembering how loved we are, despite our failures, that pushes us to love the hard to love. Yes, it does open us up for pain, and suffering and heartache, but it is the command of our Father to do it anyway.

We will never be able to match the love of Jesus. Of course we can't, but because we have been so loved by Him, we can show a glimpse of what that love is like to other people.

So take a deep breath. Remember how loved you are. Remember what it cost and then, with the Holy Spirit, go and do the same.