Keeping the heart alive...

A lot of my ponderings lately have been couched in a tree metaphor of one form or another, so as I take these musings from the privacy of my “burn it when I die” journal to the wide, wide world of blogging, it seems fitting to me to call this place “tree of life.”

This metaphor perhaps first getting its tentacles in to me about 12 years ago, when this verse just grabbed hold of me and just never let go:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick  - Proverbs 13:12

12 years ago I was 30 and living with Emily, a newly engaged, 39-year-old treasure of a friend. Through that last year of her bachelorhood (or should that be bachelorette-hood?), I grew to admire her quite a lot for her authenticity and vibrancy and determination to both relish all things beautiful and to look the pain of life straight in the eye.  We had many frank, heartfelt talks about our longings and hopes: hopes of enduring love, of being known and embraced; hopes of long and healthy life for those we love; hopes of offering something beautiful, of being found beautiful ourselves; hopes of making a meaningful impact in some corner of this wide world of God’s.  And we also plumbed the depths of the heart sickness that accompanies hopes deferred, sometimes not sure that it was really worth keeping hope alive in this life that is sometimes just plain brutal.

Yet I came around to committing to live my life to enlivening hope and longing, seeing that as the way to keep my heart tender and alive.  Yes, and vulnerable to disappointment and heart sickness, but squelching hope in order to avoid the heart sickness just sounded like death to me.

And then, on Emily and Tim’s wedding day, printed on the program for their wedding ceremony I finally saw the rest of the verse:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
    but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life - Proverbs 13:12

I’m sure I had read those words before, but having grown to know Emily’s tender and authentic heart, and the experience of doing battle together to keep hope alive, reading those words on her joy filled wedding day, it's like all of that had plowed up my heart, making it ready for this seed to take root.  It's hard to find words to express how wonderful it was to see the musings of my own heart so perfectly captured in God’s ancient word.  It was death to kill hope; no longing, no tree of life.

So that’s what brings me here.  Bringing out into the light some of the thoughts I have on what it means to enliven longing and cope with heart sickness, and the great treasure my Savior Jesus is to me in the process.  May these musings take root, grow, nourish....