Here's My Heart, O Take and Seal It!

This morning Richard Dahlstrom spoke about the prophet Joel, and the Lord's exhortation in chapter two that His wayward Israel, "Return to Me with all your heart", not with sackcloth and ashes and outer trappings of repentance but with an open heart given in trust to its Lord and King.  At this, Dahlstrom clasped his hands together, fingers intertwined, a picture of intimacy between God and His open-hearted people.  The gesture made my stomach twist with yearning. 

Don't I long to be intimately woven with Christ, living fully in the depth of His love?  Why choose otherwise?  Yet how often I nonetheless seem to withhold my heart from its only safe Keeper.  

What hubris keeps the heart's floodgates closed? What foolish, besetting pride whispers that God is not interested in the honest offering of a broken heart?  

I have railed at God for failing to be present in darkness, for seeming absent in pain and far away in the late watches of the night.  Is it possible, though, that I myself have kept Him at bay by clinging to control of the welfare of my soul?  

Do I/we have that much power anyway?  

Some days I think Ivan Karamazov is correct: free will is nice, Lord, "only I most respectfully return the ticket".  I wish God would bash through our frail volition and just give us what we really need.  What terrifying freedom we instead have to isolate ourselves from the reality of Christ's love, to suffer apart from the comfort of the Spirit, to lead autonomous, fearful lives flaunting the lordship of the Father!  

It is a superhuman work then, to bring the heart to the Lord in truth.  I rely on the prayer of whomever wrote the hymn Come Thou Fount:

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, 

prone to leave the God I love. 

Here's my heart, O take and seal it,

Seal it for Thy courts above

An Observation About Spring That Has Been Made Before

There is a tree outside my window that started to blossom the very beginning of February.  I thought the blooms were doomed to early death, but they have persevered through more snow, rain and wind than paper-thin petals ought to be able.  What a brave, tenacious tree.  I am glad for its bulldog determination to announce the new season, even in contrary weather. 

Everyone waxes poetic about spring and resurrection and baby chicks hatching and new life, especially pastors, who seem to be irrationally proud that the natural world coincides so nicely with the Church calendar and their sermons, as if Christ's resurrection actually caused chickens to burst forth from eggshells and plants to shoot out of the ground. (I sort of wish that IS what happened on that Third Day.  What a sight!  Baby animals, plants, trees, green things, popping into existence like fireworks!)  I am not claiming, therefore, to say anything very new about how springtime provides tangible reminders of that great New Life that is the crux of our human history.  It does do those things, but I am neither the first nor the last to notice.  

Nonetheless, it is nice to sit on one's front porch in the evening with some chamomile tea in order to watch the sun sweetly stain the Western sky.  It is also nice to see blooming cherry branches curled delicately in the day's last light.  No matter how many people have thought the same, spring is still hopeful.