Two Hearts

And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made[a] into a woman and brought her to the man.  Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones

    and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

    because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Genesis 2:22-24

Two arms.

Two eyes.

Two legs.

One heart.

My daughter found a short little poem online asking why we were given two of nearly everything but only one heart. It was cute and made a good point.

We have one heart because our other heart lives inside the man (or woman) the Lord has set apart to be ours. If we are married we know where our other heart is. It lives inside the person that holds our heart in his/her hands.

Can you see the other heart the Lord gave you when your husband (wife) speaks to you? Can you feel it?

I have read many comments by other writers (all women) that talk about their husbands. Every one of them calls him 'my' something. My hero. My cowboy. My... whatever. From the way those writers talk about their husbands it appears that they are heroes come to life. They walked right off the page of a romance novel and into these women's lives.

I am blessed to know where my second heart is. To see it. To feel it in the way my husband treats me.

But there was a time I did not know where it was. A time when I thought I would never find it. Then one day, without warning, it walked into my life when I least expected it. And nothing's been the same since.

God blessed me on that day and everyday since.

Because He made me the heroine in my own manuscript. A story that unfolds more and more with each day. A story that leaves me embracing every line and unable to put the book down.

It is a page turner.

God's mighty power.

"But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

2 Corinthians 12:9 ESV

 

 

The pen is powerful. Or in this case the word document in my computer is powerful. If you’ve been following my blog posts you’ll know that my last post was about the power of books we read and the responsibility that that puts on writers. Whether or not an author ever stops to consider how their manuscript affects their readers or not, the responsibility is still there. We may never think about it, never acknowledge it but…

It’s.

Still.

There.

Power is a mighty thing. How much power is there in things we never stop to think about? How much power is in the blowing of the wind? In the turning of the earth? In the crashing of waves against a beach? More than our human minds can ever fathom.

I have spent many hours walking the beaches on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. I have waded in the waves, swam in the salt water, relished the peace found in just digging my toes into the sand and looking out over the water. There is power in the waves that tumble one after another onto the sandy shore. And they never stop. They just keep coming. Some are bigger than others, some are foamy and white capped, others more gentle but they are all powerful in a way that no person will ever harness.

I am right now sitting on the outskirts of a town that was hit by a tornado last week. If I step outside the front door I can clearly see the damage left in the aftermath. A few miles down the road I can see it even more plainly.

I was not here when the tornado hit but I was here a couple of days before and almost a week after. In my mind I can clearly see the before and after of how the tornado effected the landscape and the houses.

The destruction shows the work of a mighty powerful hand. Sixty plus foot trees are snapped in half or flipped on their sides, completely uprooted as if they were nothing more than toothpicks snapped in the hands of a man.

What kind of force is needed to snap a tree in half like that? What kind of force does it take to toss a huge tree on its side and keep the roots intact?

In my manuscripts I have written of tornados several times. I have ‘set’ in a cabin as a tornado blew through the town where my characters were. I have taken my story through the aftermath of one, had my hero help in the cleanup and rebuilding. My heroine has comforted orphaned children that were traumatized and needed care when the storm passed.

But until yesterday I had never before seen the aftermath of a tornado up close. Several years ago a tornado hit my town. It damaged buildings but did not leave significant damage in its wake. It lifted roofs off houses and set them back in place again. When it was over there was very little evidence left that a tornado had ever passed that way.

It was nothing like what I have seen in the last twenty four hours.

And the tornados I have written did not come close to capturing what I have now seen with my own eyes. The shock and emotions that swept through me as I looked on a forest that just a week ago held tall trees that filled me with peace and made me marvel at the wonders of my Creator.

I now look at broken trees and uprooted trees that make me marvel at the power in my Creator. This tornado swept through woods and town. It destroyed. It demolished. And yet there were no fatalities. The Lord kept his hand on this place as that storm was blowing through.

I am like one of those trees in the midst of that storm. Tossed here and there. Bent and swayed by the trials and stresses of life. And yet…He keeps His hand on me. He draws me near when I feel like I can take no more. He’s there to comfort and shelter me when life is more than I can bear. And when the storms of life pass He shows me what He brought me through as I look back on the trial I thought I couldn’t handle.

And I marvel at the power of my Creator, my Savior. My Lord has tornados to oversee, people to protect, an entire world to take care of. And still He cares about me. He holds my hand when I walk through trials. He cradles me in his arms when I have no strength to stand on my own. He is there when I am close and He is there when I let space get between us.

God is the greatest writer there ever was. And I am grateful that He is writing the story of my life.

 

A blank slate

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained. What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him

                                    Psalms 8:3-4

 

Writing a manuscript…I often think it must be how a person controlling a puppet feels, and every so often, I wonder if it’s a bit how God feels. I start a story with what amounts to a blank piece of paper.

I open up my word program to a new document and stare at a blank white page on a blue background. There is nothing there. A white void of nothingness that I am going to have to fill in. If my story is to come alive, to come into being at all I am the one that will do it. Somehow I will take that page of nothing and turn it into an 80,000 word story where the characters have names, personalities, homes, families, problems, feelings…

The list of all the things I must give life to on those pages does not end. To be a good writer I need to make sure my reader can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel everything my characters do.

It’s not enough to say: She was cold. I have to be able to show that she was cold, to remind my reader what it feels like to be cold. So I use descriptions more like: The icy wind howled like the angry cry of a wild animal and cut through her thin dress like the blade of a knife. Shivers ran through her body until her hands shook so hard she had a hard time holding onto the reins. Fat flakes of snow blew around her blocking out the field beside the road.

I must create my stories, give my characters life. It all rests in my hands. If my hero and heroine have never met I need to put them in the same place at the same time so they can. To do that I have to control the scene to bring them together. Where is she? Where do I need him to be?

Now I’m not a planner so these thoughts don’t go through my head. I simply put my fingers on my keyboard and the story flows. I may not be consciously planning these things but they all come out anyway.

If I need my hero to save my heroine I can’t have her sitting safe at a quilting bee with the town ladies. I need her out in a field facing a rattle snake, or falling off a cliff, drowning in a river… I have to move them where I need them to be to make that happen.

In doing all that I take a blank paper and create something that someone else can see and hear and feel. I must create imaginary life.

Very rarely do I think about these things. Today as I looked at Psalms 8 and read verses 3 and 4 I thought of them. Thought of what my Creator did when He stood before a void of nothing and made the world we all live in.

He thought of everything.

Nights would be dark so He gave us the moon and stars. We would need water so he gave us oceans, creeks, rivers, streams and rain. Air would need to be made new again and again so He gave us breath and He made plants to absorb what we breathe out and renew our air. The list of all the things He created just for us is unending.

He took a blank slate and created life.

For you.

For me.

For us.

Love

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Matthew 22: 37-39

 

In a recent post I wrote about the effects other people have on our lives. How they can change us, make us grow. I did not realize when I wrote that post that the Lord was using me in someone’s life even as I felt the effects of others in my own life.

There is a girl that passes through my life once a week. I hardly know her and rarely see her but the Lord puts us in the same place every week. A couple months ago I hugged this girl, or she hugged me. I don’t remember who instigated it but I did notice that when she hugged me she clung like she never intended to let go. After that day when I see her I try to make a point of hugging her.

Those hugs are special for me but they were but moments in my life. It was something I did because I felt like she might need it. She has managed to work her way into a spot in my heart but even at that I could not see what was happening during those brief, but clingy, encounters.

Yesterday, through my daughter, the Lord has shown me what it all meant. While I was nowhere around this girl told my daughter “no one hugs me like she does.” When I heard that, my heart became hers. This girl that could so easily have passed through my life without me paying her any attention has now become one of those moments that changed me, but more important I marvel that I may have become one of those encounters that will affect her for life.

Dear reader, Scripture commands us to love others as ourselves. This is often a hard task and is so easy to forget to do as we go about our daily lives. But we never know when the simple act of showing someone we care can mean all the difference to them. May we be the voice and the touch of Christ so that others might feel His love through us.

Miracles

While God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

Hebrews 2:4

 

There are moments in our lives when we are changed. Instantly. The birth of a first child, a life threatening encounter, a near death experience…these are all things that have that kind of power. They take what we were and turn us into so much more. There are other times when we are changed slowly, over time, in a way we cannot see or feel.

People, places, events, these all have the power to change us. We have all been changed, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but changed just the same. Life is a series of changes from before we are born until we no longer live on this earth.

Just this last week I have been changed. I was looking at what, to me, is a miracle. Sunbeams shining through the clouds. Standing there in the midst of others, I was lost to what was going on around me. There was nothing but that moment, those beautiful rays, me, and God. In that moment I was alone with my Lord and I needed nothing else. But then someone touched me, not the light touch of a passerby, or the tap of someone trying to get my attention, but the close touch of someone coming as close as they could get, leaning against me.

This person, standing so close, shared that space and time with me and God, then she shared a miracle of her own with me. I did not know why I liked this person so much, until that moment, although it took me until the next day to fully grasp it all. She was one of those moments when I was changed instantly.

Matthew 22:39 says we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, it is the second greatest commandment. There are many other verses that talk of love, even command us to love. This woman, that was one of those life changing moments for me, is a wonderful example of that love. She simply loves everyone she encounters. No one walks away without a hug and being told I love you. You cannot help but feel loved in her presence.

She is an inspiration to me. When I asked if she was always that way, she said no. Before her own life changing moment she was not this way. God worked a miracle in her life, and she is a miracle in mine.

There have been many life changing moments in my life. Looking back on them I can see God’s hand on me in each one.

My dear reader, moments will come your way when you see that change. There will be others when it can’t be seen. God is working on and through you even if you don’t see or understand it. Let him show you the miracles He has in place for you.

What miracles have you already seen? Will you share them with us?