one thing you can do for your sore heart

The mercury in the thermometer rockets and tomatoes droop sad and I water the magenta geraniums in the window boxes hanging out on the picket fence.

Sometimes a heart grows sore.

Mine has.

I weed rows of onions and pound on heaven’s door because I have got to figure out how to best spend this one life. This is all I have got to figure out.

I walk to the woods and kids blur by on bikes and I read Radicaland I make pasta salads and serve double helpings for all seven of their bowls. I listen for the hourly chime to make my work real with real prayer and I still can’t figure it out.

I try to listen.

I think about words. I can hear Thomas Aquinaswho laid aside his Summa Theologica and he’s whispering, “All I have written seems like straw to me…” I wash the floors. I think about that, all the words I have written and straw.

The box of Garnier Nutrissereads ‘Truffles’ and that shade of brown seems about right and I shake the bottle and pull on the gloves and I part a white line across the scalp every one inch, just like the folded sheet instructs, but nothing can cover my roots. I don’t know why I try to paint over crowns.

I don’t know why I struggle with who I am at the roots.

I don’t know why He just won’t tell me straight out what is the best use of these days and is there anything that lasts and where is my place in the world? This heart sloshes its ache.

This is my year of yes. This is my year to say yes to kid dreams and say yes to the mess and say Yes to whatever God gives. This year I say yes to flying and yes to speaking and yes to praying with monks. I say yes in triplicate to travelling solo across international borders and I say yes to trust and I turn a God-fident shoulder to agoraphobia and say nothing to it but, “So long.” I say yes to many more things I’m not in a place to even say I said yes to.

Late, in the still black of a sleeping house, I stand in front of the mirror and pull out a hair showing its roots.

I see the lines writing across my forehead. I think about writing lines. I wonder if I’m saying yes to the right things. I just want to live for Jesus. I turn out the bathroom light, grope about for the lamp beside the bed. I find my page in True Religion:

“I believe God wants us all to live bothered by things around us that are not right….

Possibly the most important indicator of true religion is the desire to love and care for people who hurt.“

~Palmer Chinchen

My heart hurts.

Does it hurt over the right things? Does it hurt in triplicate for the eternal or does it only hurt for things that are like straw to Him? Am I bothered by the pain in this world? Or just the pain in me?

Or is it that —- the pain in me is a result of my indifference to the pain in this world?

“Possibly the most important indicator of true religion is the desire to love and care for people who hurt.”

After the lights are flicked off, I lie there in the dark thinking about that. Is that Jesus talking to me — telling me straight out?

“You really want to know how to live your one life best? Live the True Religion. Love and care for the hurting. Reach out to the orphans and widows, “the homeless and loveless” in their distress. Figure that out.”

Just that.

Really? I’m the mother of six. How do mothers, homemakers, say yes to that? To poverty and starving children and a breaking world and how do we become the voices of prophets and the hands of saints and does He send us “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind and to release all the oppressed”? I don’t know how this works. I go to her chapter, the Proverbs 31 woman chapter.

And I don’t remember this in her chapter, in Proverbs 31:

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,  for the rights of all who are destitute.

Speak up and judge fairly;  defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

It’s Proverbs 31:8-9.

Is this what true women do? Work so that many make it Home?

Compassion‘s Shaun Groves has asked if I’ll go with them to Guatemala, go with Gypsy Mama of (in)courage, with Amanda Jones of Living Proof Ministries, and Lindsey Nobles of Thomas Nelson, go with these Jesus-bold women to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. In a year of yes, the Farmer and I pray and the kids nod sure, and I say yes. I answer Jesus. But I’m only going if I know that you are going with me and this is about you and your one life and how you hurt and aren’t we the people who long to live the True Religion?

I’m only going if I can write the lines and throw them across the space between us and you’ll grab hold of the lines and pull one child at a time, child after child, to freedom.

I’m only going because you’ll be the hands of the saints and you’ll be the voice of the prophets and you will say YES! And you will hear the heart of those who cannot speak for themselves and you will adopt another child into your heart.

They say the only way to strengthen a heart, heal a heart, cure a heart, is to not to lay in bed and let it atrophy but to pump it. Work it. Make it beat wild, pounding straight out of the hard wall of your chest.

Sore hearts need to give the coronary muscles of their Christianity a work out.We work out when we reach out.

You can know right well that when I board that plane for Guatemala my heart will be beating stallion hooves. And I know that when you open your arms to Guatemala your heart will split in two — and you won’t hurt.

Together our hearts will ache and together our hearts will break and together our sore hearts will beat wide open and our pain will ease when we ease the pain of a child beaten by poverty. With Jesus, we will figure this out.

Will you mark it on your calendar? Sept. 8-11

Will you prepare now to welcome a Guatemalan child into your life? Into your heart?

I can see September. The tomatoes will be ready and the geraniums will be fading. The thermometer’s mercury will have tapered.

And it will be our hearts rocketing straight up.

Offering pieces of heaven to heal the sore of this earth and together we’ll heal.

Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.

The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden.

~ Isa. 58

Related:
Palmer Chinchen’s True Religion. Five Star. Highly Recommended. If you have a teen in your house… consider getting this book into their hands. If you are a parent… ponder this book. It’s doing surgery on my heart.