If you’ve ever cared for a small child, you’ve probably learned that love is more than a feeling. You can’t simply “love” an infant or a newborn and have that be enough. Our love for children, instead, is a series of actions: small ones, and big ones, diapers changed and meals fed, plans laid for the future and gentle rocking in the night; and it’s all of these actions that add up to love, that help grow our love for them and their love for us.

It’s the same when God commands us to love God and love our neighbor. God commands us even to love our enemies. How can we do this? Surely we don’t like our enemies. Surely we don’t feel love for them. But the principle is the same. To love someone is to work for their good. Not necessarily for what they think is good for them, but for what is really, truly good for them; to care for them as if they were our own.

These relationships need tending. We can’t just say we love God and say we love our neighbor. We need to love them, actively; we need to commit small acts of love.

Christmas and Advent are an opportunity to reflect on these relationships, to reflect on the many ways that God has loved us, and the many ways that we can love one another. So I invite you, as Advent ends and Christmas begins, to choose one thing, one way that you can love God, one act of care in your relationship with God that you can commit; and to do it each day. Choose one way you can love your neighbor as yourself, and do it each day.

And then wait and see how your love has grown.