BEAT WITH GOD’S HEARTBEAT
Sometimes, in this grand search for my “voice,” I ache with something difficult to pinpoint or define. I feel such lack of focus b/c I find so many things in life fascinating. I wish I could live thousands of lives to experience it all, & in feeling that way, I can hardly stand to limit myself long enough to succeed! It’s a sort of spiritual ADHD, an imploding of so much awareness of life that it almost overloads the spirit. It’s an awareness of all the needs & desires in the deepest of hearts—[well, not really all, of course]—of the hurts & the longings & the joys & the loves & the connections with other people.
Maybe—just maybe—it is a small fraction of what God’s heartbeat must be for us, His lost creation. It makes me want to father the world, to cuddle all the crying babies, to bandage all the cuts & bruises & broken bones, to heal all the bleeding & battered hearts, to love all of creation with whatever it takes to restore us to Him.
I wonder if, even in our deepest despair & pain, some—maybe all—of us feel it.
My father committed suicide when I was 3½, with a .22 rifle in bed early one morning in a trailer in TN. He told Mom to get up & cook breakfast, & Charlotte (age 2) & I were asleep. And during the bacon popping, Mom didn’t even hear the pop of that .22 hollow-point bullet as it penetrated his skull, ricocheting around through his skull & —so he thought—ended his pain.
But maybe, in that aching despair, he ached for us to go on & find something he hadn’t, b/c he left 3 other bullets under the pillow, unused. Maybe he had just enough love, enough echo of God’s heartbeat, to spare us, to protect us from his own personal demons, to thrust us into a life of hope, though at the time it must have seemed hopelessness. Maybe, just maybe, he won a war for our souls as he lost his own personal battle. Maybe in an ironic, twisted way, he became a sacrifice for us.
I’ve never thought of it that way before.
I ache for him sometimes, hoping, praying, that he’s not eternally lost. I know that’s the church canon, but my heart doesn’t want to accept it.
If time is nothing to God, His heart aches as much into the past as it longs into the future. The Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world, in some sort of eternally-present moment.
And he’s calling us to feel His heartbeat in so many ways we can only begin to fathom…
Kenstewart's Blog 