Sometimes, my thoughts are so small. I think I know, because it makes sense to me. One of the lovely things about becoming more humble is that I am actually open to a different type of revelation. It is being teachable in a moment I hear, don’t understand, AND don’t discard.

When I lived on the west coast, I belonged to a spiritual community that gathered in a building that was previously a bar. This group thought outside religious boxes. For fun, we would gather instruments and amplification, and go out to the boardwalk by the ocean. We would worship the Father of Lights with no agenda other than to offer Him what He is due. Sometimes we would repent to the crowds that came to listen, for keeping the party inside the ‘church’. Those years brought life to an area of my heart. Moving in the Light healed what moving in darkness had crippled.

One of the leaders was a guy named Mark. Mark was a punk hooked on heroin and headed for fame in the rock-n-roll industry when Father revealed his love to him. His passion to love God back made him incredibly safe for me. The transformation happening in my heart was so real! It was in those days that the Lord started softening my hardest days by giving me songs. I even shared some of my songs with Mark, on a dorky little cassette tape, risking that he’d make fun of me and talk to others about my stupidness. I remember being afraid the next time I saw him. He came straight towards me. He gently said, he felt like we were kin. I wept later, at the beauty of it. Part of a family that was on the side of Love.

Mark went home, he passed away in 1999.

A few years later, I was driving into a city in the Midwest to go to a gathering of a different spiritual community. I was singing, alone in my car. Then, Mark was in the passenger seat. I knew it was him, although he was not physically in detail there, the way I had known him when he was in skin on the earth. He said he had a message for me from the Lord. He went on to share that every time I worshipped, in heaven it was his gain, because he had sowed into my gift while he was yet on the earth.

Again, I wept. How small are my thoughts, that I would imaging the barrier between heaven and earth to be to very black and white, and understandable to my very small mind.

May he continue to gain today, as I worship. Selah.

I have asked the Lord many questions over the years, since He has grown me in relationship to Himself.

He never minds me asking. He knows which answers I am ready to receive. He knows which answers I cannot yet comprehend. He knows what is in my heart when I ask.

Sometimes, what is in my heart is a demand to know. He knows those are the unyielded parts of the garden of my heart. How else will this territory be discovered unless I ask? Because how I respond to the answer is His method for developing intimacy.

As a healer, I hate to see people get hurt. There was one particular person, a number of years ago, that got hurt when I felt they were my responsibility. Not only did they get hurt, but I did not even know they had gotten hurt. The guilt that I felt was hard to hand over to the cross, where guilt absolves. I kept myself on my own hook, for years. I knew the cross was ‘enough’ to forgive me, but somehow I could not ‘let it go’.

Recently the Lord initiated a conversation with me about it.

“you felt like you didn’t keep him safe”

I didn’t, was my response.

“did I keep you safe?”

I contended that his definition of safety was different than mine. I remembered his wisdom in Matthew 10: 27What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the housetops. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.…

I argued that his definition of safety was investing in me so that I might live with Him in eternity.

“oh” pause “what if we applied that definition of safety in this situation?”

I thought about that. I have been thinking about that. In this person’s life, I did sow heavily towards truth that made the bridge into eternal life. He brought to mind moments, experiences and teachings. he reminded me of illustrations and teaching and exhortation I had done. His question back to me, if I did indeed keep them safe according to his definition, feels like a nugget I need to examine from many angles. If this is how He sees it…

How many of the places I have carried guilt or shame is because I have not understood the perspective, definitions and currency of heaven?

I am challenged to be larger than my limited human perspective, again. Because when my questions are asked, but not as a demand, I hear and respond differently to his answers.

I remember the day she came. We sat on the gazebo. She had just recovered an incident that had happened to her years before. She could report the details. From a clinical place it made sense to her.

And then there was the disconnect. She certainly could NOT feel anything about this incident. Not the pain and trauma during it, nor the grief that followed. Not the shame /guilt that had kept it hidden all these years. Not the loss that had happened and followed her, costing her relationships and intimacy throughout her life.

So, we sat. I remembered Job’s friends, and how very good they were in friendship to just set, and quiet with their friend in the place where words become useless and interruptions.

It was ten am, on a cloudless day in the Midwest. To the west and north, beyond the old oak, were the farm fields, expanses of land that were vibrant with life. To the south were the woods that rehearse how it was before man, and to the east lay the pond, a 3.34 surface acre of all-things-pond.

I wondered if the Healer would come on the wind. Or with the birds. Or in squirrel antics, or any of the other innumerable way he comes in his time. And I just sat with my friend. We all need someone who can hear the terrible and still want to be with us. I can do that. He has done that for me.

The bullfrogs began their chorus. It was an odd chorus for the morning, the song they make by taking turns with their sounds and rhythms. I watched as the first tear fell from the eyes of my friend. I knew then that the Healer had added his sound into the bullfrog chorus. He was infusing the comforts and permissions she needed to safely feel. I felt the pain come first, up and out, escorted by Wind to He-who-carried-all-pain-to-reconcile. Some trauma followed. Grief was mingled in. I watched as her brain and heart began to reconcile in the impossible place, but not without hope, because healer was there. Sometimes the privilege I have to witness his work in the hearts of men is beyond language.

She came stuck. She left free.

And I am undone again, as I remember, the power of the cross.