Finding faithful beauty in the longings of the heart.
Do you value gentle, intentional ways to tend to the heart inside you?
I'm here for that.
It was the glare of the sun off the icy surface of the pond that held my fancy. My eldest girl and little boy were pushing their toes against the edge to test the strength of the ice. Melting as it was, none of us had ever seen the pond out back of the house sit so frozen. It was new and delightful. Their giggles and awe were the soundtrack, with the glare of the sun freezing the moment too, like a dream. A hand reaching for mine. A question that remembers me, as if the Author of the story stepped in to tap a shoulder, show a smile, invite a heart like a dare - do you trust me? When so much in life feels bleak, that’s when my imagination can feel most eager to come alive , to catch the light and dream of what it’s saying. Lately, it’s a wondering question that keeps bringing itself back to my attention. Is this design on purpose? Maybe the imagination knows that it is a gift that was God-intended to help us hold onto hope for whatever it is that God is doing with the story? And when we’re most discouraged, is that where the imagination knows it has a role to play in helping us to imagine why we could still be hopeful? Perhaps imagination is most deeply intended as a beautiful gift meant to help a heart find hope. Maybe it’s a place longing to point to a God who is able to do more than all we could ask or think. For how would we think to ask for anything, if we could not first imagine the idea that God hears our asking and longs to meet us? And yet I know how much deceit likes to befriend my imagination, as if God’s own enemy wants to possess and distort his good creation. For my heart knows the path to be excruciating, when the story of life is imagined in a way that keeps one deceived about reality, not seeing what is really true inside of actual life. Imagining away the truth of what is real, has kept this heart stuck for seasons too long, exhausting itself for false kinds of hopes. And too, this heart has imagined away such good and real gifts, when its attention was most drawn to the gifts it didn’t have. It was a kind soul who first helped me see how I had imagined away the reality of so many different kinds of love in my life. How much beauty in the world can be imagined away for the sake of what we’re afraid to lose. Arresting is the lure to imagine the worst inside another if it can keep us in the comfort of the self-protections we know. In all the ways deceit longs to befriend our creative minds, perhaps all along what it’s most wanting is to interfere with the way we meet God. At its worst, my imagination would love for me to leave this present moment - the very place where God is waiting to meet me. And at its deepest root, deceit loves to tempt me to imagine God to be someone other than who He truly is… even if it’s in the most subtle of ways. For if I trust that God is as good a Shepherd as He promises to be, why would I need false hopes, false narratives, or preoccupation with what is missing? If I can trust God to be the God who provides, why would I need to imagine away the places in my heart that need care and support and healing for broken things? If I can trust that God is the same Love He says He is, who desires good for me, and is a safe place for all of me to come just as I am, why would I need to pretend away the worst in me, or imagine the worst inside my neighbor? Perhaps we are human with imaginations that are broken. Perhaps we all know this plight. We forget, and again we forget, how to imagine hope and beauty in light of our true God. And perhaps a shared humanity is the best gift we have to help imagine a tender world inside each other beyond what we can see. Maybe Love Himself knows each of us in the place where we are all children in need of the most tender Love. Perhaps a shared humanity is where He longs to meet us, a Love in flesh who lovingly wore this skin, grew into it, and cared for it as He cares for us. Imagine Him. See the truth of how He came for sinners (Luke 5:32), feel the truth of how He loved in flesh, and imagine how He looks at us. Maybe a broken imagination renews with healing hope every time it imagines the truth of Who He is. Maybe in the light of a loving Father who restores what things were made for, a broken imagination could rest so deep that it longs to hold rhythms of renewing in all of who He is. I’d dare believe it’s true, that imagination is a beautiful gift meant to help a heart find hope. So glare of Light, catch us up. A hand reaching out. A question that remembers us like a compassionate Author. Do you trust me? “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Eph. 3:20-21. A prayer : Father, give us the grace to turn our imaginations into all of the Light of Who you are. Surprise us with the beauty of the glory of Christ and with it's imperfect, yet lovely reflection in Your beloved church. Practice : Read the stories of the Gospels and let yourself imagine that you are one who Jesus befriends and heals. Imagine how He looks at you, speaks to you, cares for you. Practice using your imagination to connect with your Savior. Consider ways deceit may be wanting to distort what is good and beautiful in your imagination recently. How does the truth of who your Jesus is, change the narrative?
The page of the calendar had freshly turned to November when I zipped up my boots on a cloudy light morning to wander through the evergreens behind the house so I could feel it as real. For it’s one thing to trace across words about your Evergreen God and it is another to step under the limbs of the cypress trees and touch them and take in their scent and remember the One who courts your soul faithfully holding out His branches through every season, like an Evergreen who relentlessly holds out His arms for a heart who forgets how deep she needs them alone. (Hos. 14:8, ESV) And there before the evergreen, a heart could still quiet, a heart that longs for evergreen peace. It was thirst for the quiet that brought me to sit, rest by the water, where the wind had already come to play gentle with the leaves. Almost still, yet moving. It brought them slow, one by one, from the trees to touch down on the water and follow its soft turning. All was still, yet stirring on, as if every last thing was held. As if a heart could trust that while it is resting still, all of the pieces are held, carried along, by a God who has already purposed to work every last thing for good, for those who love Him. The stillness of the water can bring springs up from the soul, to fall down a face and bring relief for everything that the heart has been holding. It can soothe a soul quiet in a world that is all so tenderly held in the mystery of a Love that is beyond our understanding. And when a mind lets go of its smarts enough to simply rest down into what is, a world and a life that is so terrible, so beautiful that it is far beyond the limits of your understanding or control is the most astounding gift to get to be part of after all. It was after the sun set that day that the words found me. “As [Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes.” Luke 19:41-42, NIV If you had only known what would bring you peace… Sometimes it can feel as if peace keeps flying away, and maybe if you just fight hard enough, say enough words, hold your ground enough, it will bring peace back to you somehow. Sometimes it can feel as if life keeps asking you to step through a doorway that feels like the absolute opposite direction of peace or anything right and everything inside you wants to slam the door. And when Jesus looked over Jerusalem and spoke those words, He knew what was coming (Lk. 19:43-44), how Jerusalem was getting ready to slam a door as if it would bring them peace. Yet Jesus knew, with a heart that churned in ache for them, that this would be their destruction. For they were more concerned over what looked wrong out there, than they were concerned with considering their hearts. Jerusalem wanted peace. And Jesus longed for them to know peace too. The deepest core of what they desired - peace - was the very same thing that Jesus desired for them. Yet, as readily as it was available, Jerusalem wouldn’t have eyes to see the Way that would truly bring them peace. And the image of Jesus’ broken weeping remains in Scripture with longing invitation to all who want peace. Here is a friend, a brother, who is not at war with our desiring hearts, but rather is broken with anguish when our trust in Him fails and we allow our desires to become distorted and twisted by fear into something that could never bring us what we most deeply want. It was Jesus’ Love, broken in longing for our own confused hearts, that carried Him to step through a doorway that felt like the opposite direction of peace or anything right and involved painful separation from His own Father. For the joy set before Him, Jesus chose the way of peace and stretched out His arms in the pain. Those arms stretched out are branches always green with the promise of life and a place where you will never once be without a friend, closer than a brother, who perfectly understands you without fail. While there are many ways we could go in this life and everyone of them will come with pain, here is the gift of an evergreen pain that comes with a promise always alive. And these evergreen trees that we can still live and breathe in the presence of promise us that the gift is here today. Until life passes, it asks us, always, which hard path we’ll choose, and heaven waits for us, longs for us, to look up, reach for the fruit that feeds a heart, and whisper it from a heart unshrinking… Be my Evergreen God.
You can wander under the branches of trees and feel how they simply invite your heart to come just as it is in a place where you are safe to wonder about anything under the trees that are so quietly patient with the space a heart needs. I wander along the path beside the creek and I spot a turtle. I stop under the shade of the trees and step into the grass for a closer look. I spy what seems to be a much younger, smaller turtle sitting close by her. I consider them for a while, the way their heads tilt, the way they warm themselves in the sun. I slowly step a bit closer, but I am noticed and it’s the older turtle that splashes down, ducks under the water first. Within a few seconds the baby slowly follows, as if maybe he’s not sure why, but it’s what she’s doing. He’s not as cautious as her, but he follows along, and I imagine him bidding me goodbye. He’s a little more new and open to the beauty of the world while she is older and seemingly, a good bit more careful, guarded. Later at home my girl asks me if I’ve noticed the little white flowers in our yard, how they close up tight in the heat of the day, but how in the cool of these September mornings they open wide their petals to take it all in. I had walked by those flowers day after day and I had not once noticed that. I begin to turn my gaze that way a little more each day, waiting to see each time they open up again. How do they know? How do they know when to open and when to close? How does anyone know when to open and when to close? And what is it inside us all that would keep us hungry for places to open our hearts again after the times when we’ve opened and it all went terribly wrong? How in the world is it that something inside us keeps wanting to believe that there is goodness in our desire to open? What inside us is continually hungry for that? I feel the questions while old turtles go on splashing back into the water, while flowers go on closing in the heat of day. And I feel them while the new life of young turtles linger in the sun just a little longer, while little white petals go on opening to the freshness of the morning. While those flowers in the yard tell me that it is not always a time to open, what they speak most to my heart is there to be found in the cool of the day. Each day those white flowers in the yard testify with assurance to my heart in what it can feel must be true: that there is utter beauty in the desire to open. And even while the old turtle has seen more life than the baby and has much that she knows, it’s the baby turtle that gets to feel the beauty of lingering in the sun just a little longer. And it’s my own children that pointed out to me the white flowers that I kept simply passing by without noticing the beauty of the sermon that they were offering with their silence. The act of opening wide to goodness was made to be beautiful, a thing to be desired. It’s a desire that was embedded into life from the beginning of the world. We enter this world with heart’s made in the image of our Maker’s heart. And whether we continue in this life to open to seeking out the goodness of our heart’s deepest desire or not, these hearts, deep down inside, long to open wide and keep seeking after all of the goodness of Love as it was most truly made to be. And how does one open well? And how does a heart begin to know what the Love truly looks like that it longs to open to? For we are also embedded in this broken world with hearts broken by sin, easily deceived into things that hold a kind of form of Love without being at all what we’re truly looking for. How are we to live toward Love? And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Lk. 10:27. That’s how Jesus says it in Luke. He begins with the heart here. In Matthew, he says to love the Lord “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “your neighbor as yourself.” Mt. 22:37. In Mark, he says to love the Lord “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “your neighbor as yourself.” Mk. 12:30. While the order of things isn’t the same in each instance, one thing that is the same is that Jesus leads with the heart when He gives the greatest command. And he calls for a Love where the parts of us join together to live into it as a whole. Why, when it comes to the greatest command of Love, does Jesus begin with the heart? It’s an important question to sit with. One thing we know about these hearts inside us is that they won’t be intellectualized into submission; they simply are not persuaded that way. And the heart within us is the very wellspring of life (Prov. 4:23) that God has placed inside us. Everything we do flows from it. The heart is the life of our being. While Jesus calls us to Love God with all of our mind, He also calls us to a life that does not concede to dutifully obeying Love with the mind alone, or even with the mind first, but to a Love that gives way to seeking and searching out how to Love with all of the heart. The heart must seek out and find the deepest reason why it longs from the depths of its being to submit to something, and the heart will not settle for anything less. Perhaps these hearts inside us know something that really is quite true: that to Love out of duty, while the heart is not in it, is not the kind of Love that we were created for at all. What we do know is that it’s not the kind of Love that Jesus calls for in us. Astoundingly, Jesus calls us to a Love where the parts of us form a whole that we can live with heart. As people called to such a glorious wholeness, what do we do with the aching tensions, longings and questions that these hearts inside us can feel? We can keep our hearts with all vigilance and refuse to treat them as useless things to be afraid of and set aside. Fear of our own hearts leaves us making fragmented decisions, afraid that the very thing we were made to love and seek God with is only trying to drag us to the ground. He made these hearts inside us for beauty and we can safely hold that. We can fully validate and honor what our heart is feeling, without agreeing with fearful or untrue thoughts that we have in that place or acting on the deceitful impulses we feel. As an example, feeling sad about mistakes we’ve made is a valid feeling inside us that we can fully honor and grieve, even while disagreeing with fearful thoughts that we are a failure. This is not how God sees us, for He delights in us, ready to greet us with His beaming smile whenever we come to Him just as we are, needy for the goodness of His redeeming Love. Lk 15:20-24. In the same way, and through the comfort of that same Love, feelings of anger about a situation can be fully validated even while letting go of a desire to control a situation as if we are God. There is no feeling of the heart that ever needs to be invalidated, and we can navigate our feelings best when we know and acknowledge their true existence while letting go of fears. We can determine to gather the true information that our feelings help us find about the needs of our hearts. When I am feeling afraid or unloved, my heart is telling me true information that I have a need for something that will help me more deeply know or remember that I am safe and Loved. To deeply honor and regard that need is an essential way to live into Love with the heart. We can take the true information our feelings have given us and feel our way closer to the God who satisfies our souls and loves to provide for our needs. Sometimes we can do this through prayer and the Word and healthy rhythms of life, and sometimes we have a very real need to feel our way closer to God by taking other steps with the needs of our hearts. Sometimes it may be a need to let people we trust know how we’re really doing, the questions we’re really feeling, and asking for people to sit with us there so that we can seek out the places where God can speak Love to us through His people when we’re having trouble hearing the truth of His Love by ourselves. Sometimes we may carry a question in prayer and companioned love until we see one next little step through our heart’s questions to step toward the wholeness of Love. As we continue to seek truest Love with our hearts, even when we don’t know just what we’re doing, we’ll keep learning and we’ll have more wholehearted Love to give, because we have received God’s care and compassion for us. We Love because He first Loved us. 1 Jn. 4:19. Our deep curiosity and longing can be used in wonderful ways to follow after Love with our hearts and live into the wholeness of Love as God made it to be. And just like those little white flowers in my yard, what we’ll find when we follow Love with the heart is that the desire to open to goodness always was, at its core, a truly beautiful desire after all. It’s a desire meant to lead us to the goodness of the One who is truest Love Himself, the very thing that the depths of our hearts have always been hungry to open to after all.
