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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Heart Blocker

Well, hello again. I know it's been a while but I recently had a friend tell me I needed to get off my duff and start writing again. So here I am, once again, with a renewed commitment to embrace the writing I love so much. I'll start with my favorite story of late involving my youngest son.

My Christopher and I pray together a lot. So on this one day not so long ago, we found ourselves in my car heading to the store and guess what, we were praying again. And I asked him who he wanted to pray for and his response was that he wanted to pray for his friends...even the ones who are mean to him. Now my first thought was, if they're mean to you why do you call them friends, but I didn't voice that thought because I was just so proud he had managed to master a concept I had not mastered. My next thought came out in the form of a question, why do you want to pray for them? (still very curious as to how he has managed to get this concept). His answer to me was so profound it is still ringing in my ears so listen carefully. "Because I love them, their hearts are just blocked".

Wow! My son just blew me out of the water with that one. How, at his age, did he get that? For those of you who don't know, my son was recently diagnosed with Aspberger's which is part of the autism spectrum. With all of these labels that he's just been given I am chosing to focus on what I know to be true about my son. He is creative, he is caring, he is loving and he loves life and God. He has such an innocent and pure love for God that it amazes me and there are so many times that God grants him incredible wisdom that just shocks me. So when he gave that answer I had to ponder it. Why, because God says for us to come to him as little children and that made me think of Christopher. He is that little child. Not the already jaded elementary age kids we see too often today but the innocent child that still believes that at the very heart people are still good, that God's plans truly are better than our own, that God truly can do the impossible and prays until something miraculous happens knowing that no matter how long it takes-something miraculous will happen, that he is treasured and loved by all around him and by a God that thinks he's priceless, and a child who doesn't hesitate to run and jump into the arms of his Abba Father.

This same child who knows that even though his friends may be mean to him, their hearts are just blocked. Unlike us, because we immediately seek to judge these people don't we? We judge them instead of considering their back story. Maybe their having a really bad day or lost their job or lost a loved one. Maybe they've had a bad life and have hurts and trauma that has hardened their heart. Whatever their story, we don't think about it, we just judge them and write them off. I once had walls around my heart (truth be known, there are still some standing but they're smaller now and have some holes, their crumbling slowly) but I used to have so many walls, no one could see around them and scaling them was near impossible and for years, no one even tried. Until some people came along and cared about my back story. They cared about why I had walls and they made the effort to be the visible expression of Jesus in my life. They loved me in spite of my walls, they cared for me, they prayed for me, they considered me a friend and they kept working at tearing down my walls until one day like the Berlin wall they crashed and they forever changed the trajectory of my life.

You can have that impact on someone's life. When you make the commitment to come to the Lord as a little child, that's one of the things you're commiting to. Not judging others, simply loving them and being the expression of Jesus in their life. You are saying you will choose to believe the best about them even when it doesn't seem as if they deserved it. If you think back, someone came into your life and did that for you, even though you didn't deserve it. When you do that, you can forever change the trajectory of their life. Who in your life do you know that you've judged unfairly, not knowing or caring about their back story? Stop blocking your heart and seek to help them stop blocking theirs. I'm so glad someone did that for me.