Meditations from the heart

The smallest seed planted into a heart ready to receive will take you places you never imagined. This is where it began. An ordinary conversation with my sister led us to a moment that changed my life. Over the last 3 years God took a prayer I prayed “help me Father to see my sister as she is,” into a beautiful open vulnerable relationship, that I could have never imagined. It’s the type of relationship where you see the things the other cannot see. The deep longings of the heart buried deep within the soil of the soul. God has given me a heart to call out the things I see buried deep within another. Speaking it out gives it movement and it begins to rise out of its nestled cocoon. Sometimes we speak and we don’t even realize the impact our word can have upon our life. A word from God at the right time has great power. Power to move us and help us to move from all the lies that hold us back. And there are so many lies from our childhood that have woven themselves in and around our hearts cutting off the blood that would give us life. But God was beginning to move in though I couldn’t see it at the time.

A small seed began to move within me and words began to flow from my lips. Words that would change the trajectory of my life and how I saw myself and how I would see myself months later. Looking back now I can see it though at the time I just couldn’t. And that’s how God works. He plants these little seeds. They are so small we barely see them. We don’t even know they are there. A shift began to change within my heart. My heart began to see as if magically overnight my it grew a pair of eyes and began to see what was always there. I began to look at my sister and see a woman with an amazing vision on her life. A calling much larger than me. I began to speak this over her and over her and life began to move within us.

Some time passed and then one day my sister asked me if I would help her facilitate a woman’s retreat with her. Without a thought I said yes. The seed began to grow, to move. God had gifted me with the ability to write so my sister asked if I would write for the retreat. Again I said yes. Sometime had passed and God gave me a confirmation that this was the path He wanted my sister and I to walk together. A path towards our inner healing. Since that day I prayed that prayer God had come between my sister and I and had brought more healing. Long hard conversations of what we’ve been through together had brought a healing I never could have anticipated. After all who could understand more than the one who had gone through it with you. Conversations that dig and dig at that hard rocky soil of the heart.

At this time I was attending Community Christian and received a word from God. It came from the story of Mary and Elizabeth. Mary had just received a seed from God. She was with child and no ordinary child, the Son of God who would come to give us our hearts back. Our cold, hard, stony hearts. A seed began to grow. Mary ran to share this with Elizabeth. Luke 1:39-45 says 9 Mary immediately got up and hurried to the hill country, in the province of Judah, 40-41 where her cousins Zacharias and Elizabeth lived. When Mary entered their home and greeted Elizabeth, who felt her baby leap in her womb, Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth (shouting): 42 You are blessed, Mary, blessed among all women, and the child you bear is blessed! 43 And blessed I am as well, that the mother of my Lord has come to me! 44 As soon as I heard your voice greet me, my baby leaped for joy within me. 45 How fortunate you are, Mary, for you believed that what the Lord told you would be fulfilled.

The Spirit began to speak to me and showed me that my sister was Mary. God had given my sister a calling and I was Elizabeth seeing the calling and speaking life over it. Filled with Gods spirit I saw the things in my sister she could not see and my spirit leaped when I saw all that God had called her to. God showed me that this seed He had planted in my heart for my sister was like a baby growing within the womb and as the months passed and I wrote and wrote I would be stretched to see Gods vision and what He wanted to say.

There were pains along the way when I had to wrestle with laziness, pushing myself to write. Wrestling to see the vision of the retreat and coming into agreement with God and my sister. Wresting with constructive critism, the demon that causes me not to write. Wrestling with my voice of this is not good enough. Then there were the acts of nature that prevented us from having the retreat in the mountains. We had to let go of how we wanted it to go and instead let it be what God wanted it to be.

Finally the time arrived and my sister and I made the drive to San Diego and walked inside the house and it couldn’t have been more perfect. A moment shared between two hearts that had been beaten, torn and lost together. We separated much like we did when our hearts were torn apart from years of abuse. Walking the beauty, the serenity. A moment of perfection shared with the one who gave us a new heart and a new spirit. I walked into the kitchen and along the wall was a narrow rectangle table and on the table sat a cube and on the cube was the words DESERVING. I looked at it and the words came into me through my eyes and like a jar of warm honey began to drip slowly down from my mind and wrap around my heart loosening up all the lies that had tangled around it. I felt warmth and I felt love.

As I sat in this moment I thought about how God was in every little detail and even now He was healing me. To know in this moment I am deserving, to feel it, to know it breathed life into me. The seed grew more. As the girls began to arrive my insecurities began to grow. The greatest battle was about to begin. All the stories that I have told myself about myself started to grow. They are plain out lies that I believed planted from years of abuse. Words like you know you don’t belong. You’re so quiet and no one even listens to you. Come on you know no one likes you and they never have. I wrestled and I wrestled.

When my sister first asked me to embark on this adventure with her I didn’t even think about my insecurities, not until this moment when I was face to face with them. That first evening as I shared my story and no one said a word to me. Ahhh…crickets are the worst to the one who needs validation. That evening I went to bed feeling empty and depleted when just hours earlier I had stood in front of those words on the cube feeling accepted and loved just as I am.

The next morning I rose early as I am in the habit of doing. While I stood in front of the mirror I was bombarded by ugly words of insecurity. I found a quiet place and began to read. I sat at a table and Jesus pulled up a seat and sat down across from me. He looked at me with warm eyes as He always does and He took my hand because He knew I let the enemy have a seat at my table and He began to speak to me. He said, “Words have power. The words you speak over yourself has the power of life and death and you my dearheart are speaking words of death over yourself. It was one of the most enlightening moments of my life and the seed that was planted months and months ago began to grow and grow. Jesus reached inside of me and took out my hard, cold stony heart and then He reached inside of himself and took His warm, open, welcoming kind heart and placed it gently inside of me and that is where He is.

These days every morning before I begin my day I take a stone heart that my friend gave me for my birthday and I place it at the foot of the cross and I take a cross that I received years go and wear it near my heart as a reminder that He has taken my cold, distant stony heart and has given me a new heart, a good heart. I take good care of this heart now. I care about this heart and so does Jesus. I pray each morning that He would help me keep it open, warm and welcoming and I know that He will no matter what comes. I’m just not willing to lose it again. Now I have a good heart worth fighting for.