Breaking Into My Heart

There are times in my life when I have stopped the daily routine, looked backwards and taken stock of my life. I'm in one of those periods right now. I evaluating the realities in my life and I'm seeing something special. I realize that I have allowed love to break into my heart.

How do I know this? Well, I can feel it. I can feel love inside my heart for the first time in a long while. A love that is divine, telling me that I am good, that I am made for something, that I am his child. It is a love that has allowed me to really take a step outside of myself and realize that I am designed to love.

Although it may seem a simple concept, for me it has been the mysterious part of the journey. I have danced around it, taught it, wrote about it, but I've always had a thin protective coating around it so it couldn't truly get to me. I hadn't allowed God's love to fully penetrate my heart.

The most subtle but obvious change has been the ability to laugh, about just about anything. I find myself enjoying life in ways that seem only distant memories of better times. I find myself enjoying other people, where I wouldn't have before. It is as though I have seen with new eyes, and the picture is good.

Rick McKinley, a gentleman I consider a mentor, even though he doesn't know it, talks often about the Kingdom of God breaking into someone. As I embrace this happening, I realize that it is He, not me, that is doing the work. He is breaking into my heart. He is restoring my soul.

The reality is that I am a self conscious person or that I am aware of my own self. For too long this has ruled my life. I have tried too long to fit in and be the right person. This is simply the desire for love. But I have looked to long to the world to love me, when His love has been there all along.

Which leads me to the question of why I could not see it? Why was this simple fact so hidden? In hindsight, I believe once I allowed love to break into my heart, I knew I had to give up control, which is a scary place. It means that I had to grow up, and become what I am designed to be, which means responsibility and consequence. It means I have to love. And in the absence of what that looks like I stepped back from it and took a seat in the stands, comfortable to watch. Comfortable to play the game the way it is meant to be played. That was me.

I realize my picture is not a whole picture. I have been on the journey in the Kingdom of God for a while. It has been rich with experiences. But is has also been about me. What about me? This inward journey has dominated my experience, and left me missing another side of the journey, the outward one, the one that calls us to love, the one that calls us to love the poor, the widow, and the fatherless.

As I look at the deeper picture behind me, the real turning point became the death of my Mother. This woke me up in more ways than I can imagine. But it wasn't until I really looked at her life that I realized she got it. She allowed love to break into her heart, to the deep crevices within her soul, and allowed it to transform her into a person that could love, and deeply. So my mom's final gift to me was an awakening. An awareness to look outside myself and see that I needed to grow up. I needed to step into who I was and allow God's love to break into my heart. Otherwise, I would miss the real point of the journey.

I've been on the journey for so long but it has never been a complete journey. Something has always been missing. Believe it or not, I started at this place of awakening. I started with God breaking into my heart. But he had things to do within me, things to work out in me, that it was a temporal experience. I was not ready to grow up. I am just grateful that he has stayed with me long enough for me to experience it again.

So I say thank you Father. Thank you for breaking into my heart and loving me so that I may learn what it means to love.