What the heart wants

Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’  (John 20:26b-28)

Knowledge is not experience, and experience is what the heart wants. It is what the heart requires to know what can be known no other way.

Easter comes with the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection, and email peppers me with books and articles offering proof or disproof of the holy miracle.

I spurn them all, although there was a time they held interest for me. That is long gone now, along with my painful straining to rationalize what neither I nor anyone else can prove … or for that matter, disprove.

I’m not interested. It’s all a striving after the wind.

I want what Thomas wanted … and got, the experience of seeing and feeling and hearing a great and final word of ‘peace’, spoken over my life with all its confusion and failures, sins and failed promise, wonderings and doubts and unanswered questions.

I want to touch the wounds of love that testify to the world that there really is a Love that does not break, a Love that never turns back, a Love for which there is no line it refuses to cross, no depth to which it will not go, no death it will not suffer, no depth of hell to which it will not descend to find the likes of me.

It is not the knowledge of many things that fills the heart. It is this, the experience of Love Uncontainable.

I come to the old stories, told again and again through the centuries …  and to me by hearts in whom that Love lived and lives still.

I come neither wanting nor seeking to know the meaning of it all. I speak the words, listening, waiting and watching for that which stirs my heart to love and long for the Loving Presence I have craved since early days.

Seeing Jesus’ shattered hands, the love I see wakes a great and surpassing love within. Amid tears and quiet joy, my heart awakens to the truth that I and the Love He Is are one, even on days when I am cold as stone and believing is hard.

But that’s not today.

Today, I see those ruined hands raised in peace, and my heart knows as only hearts can … that he is the Love Uncontainable who will haunt my heart until I am wholly his.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? My heart may not be so acutely certain of Love’s living presence as today. But I will look and listen, attending to what I read and hear, to faces known and strangers who pass, eager for that which stirs my heart to love and longing, giving thanks that the Love Who Lives … lives everywhere.

David L. Miller