Everything But My Heart

 

God is weeping. The World is weeping. The Earth is weeping. I am weeping.

These are days of tears for me as I contemplate what our children and grandchildren may experience long after I am gone. They are the people of hope, as we have been, and there is so much to hope for in the midst of destruction. This is a time to tend that hope.

My reflections turn back in time to when our daughter, Alisa, was a tiny little one, maybe three. The remembrance of her story gives me hope.

She was in bed with a high fever. When I asked how she felt, she responded in a way that I have carried in my soul all these years.

“My eyelashes hurt; my ankles hurt; my hair hurts; my cheeks hurt.”

“It sounds as though everything hurts,” I ventured to say.

In a little voice she told me, “Everything hurts but my heart.”

I held her close and thought a mother’s thought, “Alisa, may it always be so.”

I am reminded of this long-ago story as I listen today to the world. So many people, institutions, countries, and the Earth, herself, are hurting deeply— hurting to the eyelashes, hurting to the ankles, hurting to the hair, and hurting to the cheeks. Fever ravishes our society and leaves us feeling broken these days.

 

When everything seems to hurt, I hope that with Alisa, we too can say, “Everything hurts but my heart.”

Our hearts are much more than heavy-duty mechanical pumps separating health from sickness, and life from death. Through the eyes of poets over the years, the heart has come to mean feeling, passion, intuition, motivation, and the center of being and faith.

 

When the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and his friends met, they didn’t banter a quick “Hiya, how’s it going?” Rather than this, they inquired, “Is it right with your heart?” And then they listened.

Jesus left his disciples with these words: “Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.”

The Psalmist prayed:  “Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts!”

When so much seems to hurt, protect your heart. Guard it, tend it, love it. Be gentle with that which is at the center of your being. And perhaps we together can become the heart of our hurting communities, being called with new courage and boldness, to stand amidst the hungry and the poor, the despairing and the angry, with constancy, love, and hope. May we all be called with greater assurance to live our lives, and our truths with integrity and in our own unique ways.