With all of me

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away, Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting, and by and large, fun. Reading the Bible wasn't a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn't much point in going over and over the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:

"Do you believe in God?"
"Yes."
"Do you know what God is?"
"Yes."
"What is God then?"
"He's God!"
"Do you go to church?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I know it all!"
"What do you know?"
"I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees" -- and the catalog went on -- "with all of me."

Carol grinned at me, Stan made a face, and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bout of coughing. There's nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that's what it amounted to. ("Out of the mouth of babes...") Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: "And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don't forget to love yourself."

Note: The above passage is from a heartwarming book called 'Mister God, This is Anna' by Fynn. Do read it.