We travel places. Sometimes we realize where we are, really are.
Sometimes we’re looking ourselves straight in the eyes, in a mirror before us, and all we see is mud.
I wish I knew so many muddy days and years ago that I wasn’t seeing as unclearly as I thought. Muddy seemed wrong. I forgot how He had made me out of dirt and breath. I forgot how the story goes when Jesus stuck his fingers in the guy’s eyes or the other guy’s ears and then he spit. Dirt and spit and spirit, we’re all muddy.
What the heck right? What’s going on? What’s with all this mud and hard stuff to understand? Like depression—I was underneath depression for a long time. Or, as I’ve come to understand my own situation: I had a thirsty heart that didn’t know how to drink. I thought I did.
My heart was burning inside of me. It hurt. Physically, I was overcome. Emotionally, I was at a loss. Logically, nothing mattered, it didn’t change anything. Spiritually, I was dried up.
I traveled many places during that time.
But there was this one night on my bed that I traveled somewhere I never want to forget. It was exotic, the water there satisfied the deepest places in me. I woke up the next morning crying and trying to recount the journey to my husband. I was finally free.
As I had laid there and the anxiety threatened to steal my breath again, I was for the first time in a long time looking in the mirror looking through the mud. The mud didn’t leave I just finally understood what it was there for, that it was me—my design.
My heart was burning and it felt awful, it felt hopeless. Hope was nearer than I knew. Hope was pressing me, so that I could know Him by name. In this pressing I would come to know mine as well.
I took one of the biggest trips of my life that night. I leapt into the unknown, burning heart and all, to the heart of my Father, and I found there the Source of all my fire. It was holy. I had called it a burden, but it was a way, a road I needed to travel.
I heard an invitation that night and for the rest of my days I want to be sure everyone else with a burning heart knows they are invited too.
We are hungering to know, to be intimate with, what we know we don’t know yet—and to be known. But the wonderful news, that we often miss in this state of hunger and thirst, is how alive we are.
Only an alive heart can be bruised and burning. Though we die in this journey, it is only to live more fully than we ever imagined we could. And in that death we are not abandoned, we are not alone. This is the mystery, wonder and beauty of the cross we say we celebrate this Easter weekend. It is an invitation to die with Messiah, so that we can live with him.
This is a journey worth realizing. What I mean is, we’re already on it, all of us—sometimes we realize where we are.
Traveling with you,
Raynna
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