“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”  Mark 12:30.

I have to be honest with you: this whole devotion started with me doing exactly what many of us do this time of year. I pulled out a piece of paper and tried to map my life as a neat little pie chart. I labeled the slices: Work, Kids, Husband, Home, Friends, and, of course, "God Time." My goal was to "do better." I thought if I could just manage the slices perfectly—I would finally achieve "balance."

But the more I stared at that segmented pie, the clearer it became: this model was a trap. It made Jesus just one priority among many, competing for my time and energy. In a moment of frustration and clarity, I finally just took a marker and wrote the name "JESUS" right over the entire pie chart.

That's when it hit me: The goal is not balance. The goal is saturation.

Jesus isn't looking for a slice. He wants to be the apple filling—He wants to be the flavor in every bite—that steady, sweet presence that makes its way into every single part of your day.

Mark 12:30 is a call to total saturation—loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. This command leaves no room for compartmentalization. When we love God with all these things, we are inviting Christ to infiltrate and transform our life, not just occupy a corner of it.

The enemy knows he can't always steal our faith, so he settles for stealing our focus.  He is content to let us give God a "good slice" on Sunday morning, so long as he keeps our minds fractured with worry and our strength depleted by saying "yes" to every commitment during the week.  He wants us to live in the exhaustion of separation.

Have you ever wondered why God demands the "all" of us? It's not because He is greedy; it’s because He is good. This sweet surrender is not a burden; it is the path to genuine freedom and joy—a welcome relief from the exhaustion of trying to "balance" everything ourselves.  

This year, let's stop the exhausting work of trying to be a "perfectly balanced" woman and instead become saturated women.  When Jesus is the apple filling, the "sweetness" isn't reserved just for our Sunday mornings; it flows into our Monday deadlines, our Tuesday chores and our Wednesday worries. When we choose saturation over separation we stop trying to "fit God in" and start letting Him "flow through." 

Call to action:  Which 'slice' of your life have you been trying to manage all on your own? How can you let His sweetness seep into that specific area today?