Genesis 1:20-21 — "And God said, 'Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.' So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good."
Loving people in theory is not very hard.
In theory, you are patient and kind and slow to anger. In theory, you lead with grace and speak with gentleness and assume the best about everyone. In theory, your marriage is rooted in mutual respect, your children are being raised with intention, and the difficult people in your life receive the same love from you that you would want to receive yourself.
And then someone needs something from you for the fifth time today and you have nothing left. And the same argument happens again in your marriage. And your child looks at you with those eyes and you hear your own mother's voice come out of your mouth. And the person you were trying to love well does something that makes it very difficult to keep trying.
Loving people in real life is one of the most sacred and most demanding things God has ever asked of us. The Living Waters, what you'll find labeled Marriage & Family in the blog and shop, is the garden space built for that work — the honest, daily, sometimes exhausting, and sometimes breathtaking work of loving the people God has placed right in front of you.
The Fifth Day Was Always About Being Known
Look at what God created on the fifth day. After four days of establishing the conditions for life to exist — light, structure, fruitfulness, rhythm — He finally filled the world with living creatures. Creatures that moved. Creatures that gathered. Creatures that were, from the very moment of their creation, designed to exist alongside one another.
The waters teemed. The sky was filled. Life crowded in, abundant and diverse, each kind according to its own nature, each one part of an ecosystem that could not function if any of them were missing.
This is the picture God uses for what our closest relationships are meant to be. Not perfectly harmonious — anyone who has watched a real ecosystem knows it is not without its tensions and its losses. But full. Alive. Deeply interconnected. Designed from the beginning not for isolation but for something richer.
God declared this good. Before He created human beings, before the first marriage, before the first family — He established that the world He was building was one where living things would not be alone in it. That is not incidental. That is the design.
The Waters That Were Already There
There is something I love about where The Living Waters falls in the sequence of the SSS Garden. The waters were not new on Day 5. They had been there since the beginning, separated and given structure on Day 2, the same waters that now teem with life.
In the same way, the work of The Waters Retreat — the inner healing, the tending of the emotional and spiritual life, the slow sacred work of letting God into the tender places — that work is what makes it possible for your relationships to teem with something real. You cannot love others well out of a place that has never been tended. You cannot offer what you have never received. You cannot give grace from an empty hand.
This is not an excuse to stay in the inner work indefinitely before you engage with anyone. Relationships do not wait for you to be fully healed before they need something from you. But it is a word of grace for the woman who wonders why loving the people closest to her feels so hard sometimes. The depth of love you are capable of offering is connected to the depth of healing you have allowed God to do in you. The two are not separate.
Each Kind According to Its Own Design
According to their kinds. I find myself coming back to that phrase whenever I think about this garden space, because it captures something true about how love works in real life.
The love between a husband and wife is not the same love as the love between a mother and child. The love you offer a lifelong friend is not the same love you offer a neighbor you are still getting to know. The love required by the difficult person in your life is not the same love as the love you give freely and easily to the people who feel like home. Each kind of love has its own nature, its own demands, its own particular way of reflecting the character of God.
This means there is no single formula for loving well. There is no checklist that covers every relationship in your life. What it means to love your husband faithfully looks specific to your marriage, your personalities, your season of life, and the ways God wired both of you. What it means to love your children well is different in the toddler years than in the teenage years than in the years when they are grown, and the relationship has shifted into something new.
The Living Waters holds space for all of it — the specific, particular, sometimes complicated reality of what it means to love the actual people God has placed in your actual life.
On Marriage and Covenant Love
There is something countercultural, and something deeply beautiful, about treating marriage as a covenant rather than a contract. A contract has terms and conditions. A covenant has something older and harder and more sustaining than terms — it has a promise that holds even when honoring it costs something.
That does not mean staying in something that is harmful, or pretending difficulties do not exist, or performing a version of a good marriage for the people who are watching. It means bringing the full weight of the biblical vision for marriage into contact with the full reality of your actual marriage — the ordinary Tuesday version, not the highlight reel — and letting God work in the space between the two.
Marriage done faithfully is one of the most sanctifying works God invites us into, because it requires us to love someone in the full knowledge of who they actually are. Not the version we imagined. Not the version they are on their best days. The real person, on the hard days, when love is less a feeling and more a decision.
This is hard. It is also, when it is working even imperfectly, one of the clearest pictures of God's own covenant love that the world gets to see.
On Motherhood and the Sacred Ordinary
Motherhood is one of the places where the gap between love in theory and love in practice is most apparent, most humbling, and most full of grace.
The sacred ordinary of it — the meals and the school runs and the ten thousand small decisions and the bedtime prayers and the middle of the night wake-ups and the growing-up that happens so slowly you almost miss it, and then suddenly you cannot believe how much has changed — all of it is discipleship. Not a break from discipleship. Not a season you endure until you can get back to the real work. The raising of children in the way of faith is one of the most eternally significant things a mother does, even when it looks from the inside like nothing but laundry and logistics.
The love you pour into the ordinary moments — the ones that feel like they do not count, the ones no one is watching — that love is teeming. It is filling the waters of your children's lives with something they will swim in for the rest of their lives.
How We Love Others Is How We Love God
Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest, and His answer was two things that He treated as inseparable: love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. He did not present these as two separate commandments that happen to be ranked one and two. He presented them as a unified vision of what a life given fully to God actually looks like.
Which means the relationships in this garden — the marriage, the motherhood, the friendships, the difficult people, the neighbors you are still learning to love — are not a secondary concern in the Christian life. They are where so much of the Christian life is actually lived. Loving others well is not separate from loving God. It is one of the primary ways we do it.
The resources in the Marriage & Family section of our shop are designed with that in mind — that the women who need them are not looking for formulas or performance checklists, but for Scripture-rooted companions for the real and specific work of loving the people God has given them. You'll find studies and devotionals for marriage, for motherhood, for the particular relationships that shape us most. Honest resources for hard seasons in relationships. Guidance for loving others in the ways that Scripture actually calls us to, which is almost always harder and more beautiful than we expected.
An Invitation to the Fullness
The waters teem because they are full of life. Not perfect life, not effortless life, but abundant, moving, interconnected life — each creature contributing to an ecosystem that could not be what it is without them.
That is what God had in mind for your relationships, too. Not the absence of difficulty or the performance of harmony, but the fullness of real love — covenant love, daily love, patient and imperfect and persevering love — shared between people who are all still being made into who God designed them to be.
The waters are already there. Come let them teem.
The Living Waters is one of seven garden spaces in the Soft Sacred Slow Garden. Each space is rooted in one day of creation and tends to a different area of your spiritual formation. You can explore the full garden from the About The Garden page in the navigation bar.
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