Don't clam up.

I love this child deeply.  As deep as his huge, dark brown eyes reach into me, and then probably some more.  I actually can't imagine feeling deeper about a child than I feel about him sometimes...which makes me wonder how powerfully strong my love will be for a child of my own one day.  But, for the moment I'm in right now, this is as much emotion as I can understand.

My little four year old friend, teaches me Dari and promises to buy a car for me to drive him around in, as he tells me he's taken my kilis and thrown them in the garbage.  How will I get into my home? How will I get into my work? Good thing his smile tells the truth.

You are mine, he says.  And the extent to which he means it breaks my heart.  You are my friend only.  No my sisters' , no my brothers.'  Mine.  What is that? he says, pointing at the knotted pink, green, and black anklet another child made for me.  I don't like it.  Take it off. And he tries, with his little fingers, to untie it.  And then he pulls until he is amazed by the white mark it leaves on my skin, and is distracted.

I tell him that I like it, and I wear things that I choose to wear.  I am free. I tell him that I am friends with all of his family; that I think it's important to be friends with everyone.  And I pray that  Canada will teach him to not own a woman's body in this way.  I pray that he will learn to respect all people.  I pray that he will learn not to hit me when I don't let him have his way.  I pray that he won't hit anyone by the time his fists actually hurt when they meet you.

But then he places the brilliant white clam shells I brought him from BC over his ears, and his face lights up, and he can hear it.  He leans into my face, cracks the shell a bit away from his ear so that I can hear it too.

But as I share a meal with his family, as they break their fast for the day, it's not the smooth, gentle ocean, but the stormy crashing waves that echo across my heart, as the brother, today the head of the family while their father is at work, gets angry at his older sister for not cooking bringe, delicious, long white rice that I can't quite figure out how it tastes so good, or where it comes from.  She's cooked seven dishes, including special bread cooked in a 500 degree oven with the door slightly open, in an unairconditioned apartment on a 30 degree day.  She's cooked for hours, surrounded by the rich aromas of her creation, weak from hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. I think of the wishing I've once or twice caught in her eyes, as I explain how I live with my friends, and what kind of man I might marry.  I hear the submission in her voice to her younger brother as she promises to cook rice for him the next day. 

I pray.  So, deeply thankful that I am so abundantly free.  I pray, but my words can only reach so far.  It's almost overwhelming.  I clam up.

In my weakness, the Spirit intercedes for me, with groanings too deep for words.  And so I feel this pictures, yearnings, confusion, sorrow, and joy lifted from me, and light fills me.

I cup my hands around the shell, held between our heads.  He turns, almost exasperated at this point, after trying and trying everything he can think of to make me hear it.  Hear it???? He asks, desperately.

Yeah.  I hear it.

I hear love.  

And in my ears, that sounds like the ocean.

Light Hearted.

Yesterday I could tell there was a new crescent moon, by the circle of quiet, sedated men and children sitting in the shade, waiting in the final moments before dusk.  I knew its shape by the delicious scents freely seeping through my open window on the warm summer night as I lay awake, too late, thinking.

I yearn to understand hearts.  What makes them beat? What makes them grow? What makes them break? How do they heal? How are they satisfied?  I think about atriums and ventricles and muscles, and oxygen and arteries and veins and lungs and I'm so amazed by the Creator.  I heard that our blood has the same salt content as the ocean.  And I love the flowing, rushing, constant, life sustaining, natural cycle happening in us all the time.  It's a constant creation where every particle works together, dies, and is replaced.  It's a constant purification as our muscles and brain are satisfied by this perfect, pure, invisible, always moving, essential essence, and the unclean, death, waste, is whisked away and breathed out.   It's a constant river of life, put in us by a detailed, perfect creator, twisting and turning but always RUSHING through our bodies, never ceasing until the day that we see Him, face to face.  I'm amazed by the harmony of us, how even the smallest cell is purposefully created, and how in every way I am coated, inside and out in the indescribably immaculate, decadent fingerprints of my Creator.  He made me in His image; a work of art that moves and breathes down to the smallest cell.  He holds my heart, gently, firmly, protecting me.  He is the breath of life that makes it beat.  He knows and understands the deepest pain that I could ever encounter.  He is the one true healer; above time, above circumstance, awesome in power; forever.

I walked, in the early morning, through a field of waste high, dry grass, stepping on hard ground, avoiding thistles.  I felt the stark, crisp, blades against my bare arms and legs. They seem to stand strong, but they sway in the wind and crumple under even slight pressure.  Thinking about the last time I was here is kind of painful.  The field was covered in snow...still crunchy, still dead, still beautiful.  The river rushing down over rocks is still a sign of life in both the present and my memory's form of this place.  The water.  It all comes back to the water for me.  I walk through the field memorizing Psalm 63... and praying for more of God, and less of me.  For more of the freedom I taste and long for in Him.  For freedom from the bondage of pain and sin in my heart.  For freedom from the fears and questions about the future.  For strength to surrender that beating, cracked but fearfully and wonderfully made heart inside of me...that I would be fully satisfied, as with the richest of foods, in Him.

The sun beats down, even in the morning.  It's hot and like the ground around me, I feel parched.  I long for a sip of the rushing river that I can hear above the crickets around me. And I pray for those around the world who are fasting.  I pray that in their hunger, exhaustion, and thirst, that they would experience Christ.  The thing with hearts is that the physical is not eternal.  But it's a matter of life and death.  It's a matter of freedom or slavery.  It's a matter of Heaven or Hell.  It's a matter of today and tomorrow.

And this is why I'm so desperate for heart conversations.  I care about hearts.  And I long to understand more than anatomy and biology but to understand emotion, longing, feeling, dreaming, spirituality.  I want to know in the sense of understand and experience this level of God's creation, that I may be an instrument of Him.  That I may be His hands and His feet and His voice and His light bringing glory to His name with every beat of my heart.

Please pray for freedom.  Pray that we would see scarves held in hands, blowing, dancing colourful flags of surrender in the wind, and hair caught in the breeze as a testament to freedom, satisfaction, purification, and sanctification as hearts are given to Christ.  Pray that we would see hands lifted in prayer, heads facing the Son.

Pray that we would fast as He would choose...(Isaiah 58) to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.  To share bread with the hungry, bring homeless into our houses, to cover the naked, and not hide ourselves from our own flesh.

I want to walk in the light.  Heart on my sleeve - exposed, yet clothed in the righteousness of Christ.  Seen, but protected by his mighty hands.  Working, and resting, in His time, for His glory.