Good morning…
Two quotes of divine wisdom creatively collided and fell into me yesterday.
“There’s a lovely Hasidic story,” writes author Anne Lamott, “of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, ‘Why on our hearts, and not in them?’ The rabbi answered, ‘Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.’”
God’s words are holy, divine and devoted, faithful and faultless, sacred and set apart for eternal purposes. We are designed to lay God’s holy words atop our human heart. Again and again.
Real life is heartbreaking. Storms. Anxiety. Poverty. Betrayal. Addiction. Violence. Injustice. Depression. A difficult diagnosis. Death of a loved one. Aging out of opportunity. Real life breaks our heart. Again and again.
“God,” says the prologue of my favorite book, The Hidden Life Awakened (xiv-xv), “is a self-bestowing God who persistently presses in to meet, to change, and to fill us in our deepest need with His healing Love, bringing us into oneness with Him and with each other and with His whole creation.”
In times of great need, we pray and we wait. When the moment is right, holy words are bestowed from God’s very being. Tenderizing truth trickles deep inside to begin to mend our torn apart heart. We are met. We are changed. We are filled full with God’s healing Love. We are brought into oneness with our Sustainer, oneness with each other, and oneness with all of God’s groaning creation.
Lord, my longings are sitting in plain sight, my groans an old story to you. My heart’s about to break; I’m a burned-out case. Cataracts blind me to God and good; old friends avoid me like the plague. My cousins never visit, my neighbors stab me in the back. My competitors blacken my name, devoutly they pray for my ruin. But I’m deaf and mute to it all, ears shut, mouth shut. I don’t hear a word they say, don’t speak a word in response. What I do, God, is wait for you, wait for my Lord, my God—you will answer! I wait and pray… (Psalm 38:9-16, MSG).
When our hearts break, we pray and we wait. At the perfect moment, God bestows big bits of Himself, Son, Spirit, Scripture, healing us whole one holy word at a time. Now and forever God’s healing is happening. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever (Isaiah 40:8, ESV).
…Sue…
