From the Heart to the Mind
My heart has a memory. This heart that sometimes seems a bit warn and calloused swelled within me today a fountain of love and gratitude that splashed upwards and called to my mind a happening.
It was a good number of years ago, several more than a decade anyway and not too long after I had begun a new life with my teenagers whose father was absent from our lives. I was on a daytrip with some of our church family to visit a mission run by friends and members of our small faith community whom the Lord had sent out from us to a small town in the North Georgia mountains. As we were returning back to the church property that evening, I was told that a waterpipe had burst in my home during the morning and there was some flooding; but, thanks to my son’s quick thinking and a few phone calls, friends and family had flocked to help sort out the damage and to clean up. It appeared that everyone in the church van had known of the catastrophe and had kept it hidden from me so that I wouldn’t worry about something I was too far away to handle.
When I got home, all the furniture and a line of bookcases with at least a hundred books had been cleared and moved out to the sunroom and there were big fans blowing across the damp carpet. There were at least a dozen heroes that day who had rallied to the call, and my brother, who was working for a commercial carpet cleaning business at the time, had provided industrial sized fans, wet-vac and chemicals to prevent mold. Crisis managed and overcome.
As I stepped into the aftermath, I was overwhelmed with the realization that I had been covered “in the cleft of the rock.” These dear ones and those who were with me while I was away for the day had placed me in a crevice of protection while the tempest roared, and what I saw was the glory of God’s goodness as it passed by. Precious saints whose care for me confirms and affirms God’s own heart had joined together in a labor of love. Oh, “the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints….” (Ephesians 1:18c NASB)
I don’t know why exactly my heart chose today to remind me of this wonder of community life. I do know that my entrance into worship was infused with an extra measure of love and gratitude for the people of God in my life and for the way He weaves our lives together.
Dear One, does your heart have memories of God’s faithfulness to you? Of course, it does. May you also have His goodness come to mind because of the things and the people He has written on your heart.