Your Heart His Home

My house is a spectacular mess. I keep waiting for someone from the government to show up in a hazmat suit and give me a citation for violations against human health and public safety before hauling me away to pig-pen prison. This is not what I would hope for, of course. It’s just an unusually busy season with many unusual demands — moving parents into assisted living in another state, working, managing a few of my own health issues, scheduling a minor surgery and the like. Filling out insurance forms has become a part-time job.

My beloved summer lake has now become a beloved winter lake, frozen into silence and stillness. The ice is thick enough to safely traverse, and my shining water world has become a sanctuary to me, a holy place to walk and pray and listen for God’s voice.

It was just one of those days. I found myself sitting at my desk, overwhelmed with work and deadlines and decisions to be made, deep concerns over loved ones seriously ill. I love my work and my life, but it was just piling so high. I needed to go walk in the desert with Jesus a while.

Make no mistake, my husband is a man’s man. For his “bachelor party” my siblings gave him a day at a recreational facility called “Drive-A-Tank,” where he spent the afternoon with my brother firing World War II machine guns and driving an obstacle course in a Cold War tank — complete with a water feature. He has hung the bulls-eyes from that day prominently over his work bench in the basement. It was, he reported, “a blast!” Pun intended.

It pierces the spirit. How many more stories like this must we endure? Can there be atonement sufficient to cover this sweeping level of corruption and suffering?

A woman emails me to tell me about her daughter: She’s 12 and has tried to commit suicide multiple times. She’s in a mental health facility, and she’s not making much progress. Would I please pray?

You know you’ve crossed some mystical threshold in aging or illness the moment that water aerobics begins to look, well ... appealing. I confess, I crossed that threshold about a year ago.

If a good man is hard to find, maybe you’re not looking in the right places.