The Resurrection of Our Heart

Life on the road requires recollection of our Love’s past deeds on our behalf and his promise of continued faithfulness to us. We will need courage and patience and those are strengthened by remembering. We will need memory, which is to say, we will need faith.

Faith looks back and draws courage; hope looks ahead and keeps desire alive. And meantime? In the meantime we need one more item for our journey. To appreciate what it may be, we have to step back and ask what all this is for. The resurrection of our heart, the discovery of our role in the Larger Story, entering into the Sacred Romance—why do we pursue these things? If we say we seek all of this for our own sake, we’re right back where we started: lost in our own story. Jesus said that when a person lives merely to preserve his life, he eventually loses it altogether. Rather, he said, give your life away and discover life as it was always meant to be. “Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self” (Matt. 16:25, The Message). Self-preservation, the theme of every small story, is so deeply wrong because it violates the Trinity, whose members live to bring glory to the others. The road we travel will take us into the battle to restore beauty in all things, chief among them the hearts of those we know. We grow in glory so that we might assist others in doing so; we give our glory to increase theirs. In order to fulfill the purpose of our journey, we will need a passion to increase glory; we will need love.

Memory, imagination, and a passion for glory—these we must keep close at hand if we are to see the journey to its end. Dragons and nits and the noonday demons lie in wait. But the road is not entirely rough. There are oases along the way. It would be a dreadful mistake to assume that our Beloved is only waiting for us at the end of the road. Our daily communion and intimacy with him, together with the gifts he gives us along the way—these are more than enough to sustain us along our path.

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