After a month of wandering through the desert of Easter preparations, I came back to the blog to post and to catch up on comments from folks.
There were stories shared that made me weep. I am so grateful for your transparency and humility, friends; I am transformed by your stories. Thank you. In the wrestling of hearts I see Jesus folding his arms around all of us and knitting us even closer together.
Brittany, what you did in taking that crucial step of asking God into your life and your heart will have repercussions in eternity. "Every person the Father gives me eventually comes running to me. And once that person is with me, I hold on and don't let go." John 6:37. He will never leave and desert you. Know that He is running hard after you even when you are sick and tired and feeling blind and alone. Thank you so much for being a part of this community.
Trevor, I am so humbled by what you shared. I am also incredibly proud of you and grateful for what God is doing within you, and please be assured that I see that in your face and in your eyes, and that this is a good and real and true peace to which He will bring you again and again.
I want to share with you something that I have been working through lately.
From Henri Nouwen's "Life of the Beloved."
"DEAR FRIEND, being the Beloved is the origin and the fulfillment of the life of the Spirit. I say this because, as soon as we catch a glimpse of this truth, we are put on a journey in search of the fullness of that truth and we will not rest until we can rest in that truth. From the moment we claim the truth of being the Beloved, we are faced with the call to become who we are. Becoming the Beloved is the great spiritual journey we have to make.
Augustine's words, "my soul is restless until it rests in you, O God," capture well this journey. I know that the fact that I am always searching for God, always struggling to discover the fullness of Love, always yearning for the complete truth, tells me that I have already been given a taste of God, of Love, and of Truth. I can only look for something that I have, to some degree, already found. How can I search for beauty and truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart? It seems that all of us human beings have deep inner memories of the paradise that we have lost. Maybe the work "innocence" is better than the word "paradise." We were innocent before we started feeling guilty; we were in the light before we entered the darkness; we were at home before we started to search for a home. Deep in the recessed of our minds and hearts there lies hidden the treasure we seek. We know its preciousness, and we know that it holds the gift we most desire: a life stronger than death."
Here are the questions to ponder:
1) Why does pride seem so much better than the simple acceptance of God's love? Why do i choose my own vanity, with its restlessness, over God's love, and its rest?
2) How can i remind myself daily to continue to pursue God even as He pursues me?
3) How will I work to keep my heart sensitive to what God is doing?
Many of the stories we have told one another lately have much to do with the condition of our heart. We often talk about keeping our hearts "soft." Like the walls around a city, when we harden our hearts we keep out anything that can change, shape, hurt, or move us. When we keep ourselves open, throwing wide the gates to our inner self, God can move inside and live, breath, within us.
Thus our largest task every day becomes thrusting wide the gates to our hearts that seem so ruthlessly disposed to closing themselves up and returning us to our impregnable state: cold, hard, blind, alone.
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