Smiling and Weeping a Bit

I walked into a tiny apartment behind the home of a semi-senile elderly woman, clicked on a soft light and smiled. It was a long day, filled with apologies and challenges of the heart. There isn't much exciting to tell about if you consider excitement parachuting from a private plane or wave running in the open surf. Life certainly contains plenty of parties, overseas trips and late nights out for a single computer consultant in South Florida, but that's not what makes my heart race.

There is that moment suspended in nowhere when you look across a room and know that God has place each person exactly where they are supposed to be. It is when attention stands on end like the hair of an animal defending it's offspring. Every attitude change of everyone there echoes through the room like notes of instruments never before played, each person having a story told through the expressions on their face. And the beauty is in waiting for each piece like a catcher crouched behind home plate. Friendships are simply in the waiting and not getting up to leave before the story is told.

God's plan for each of us involves intimacy. Intimacy with Him, and intimacy with each other, not the kind spoken of in cheap romance novels, but a kind that transcends common friendship. It is the kind that happens only in stories about best friends, but it's not just available in paperback. The beauty of it is for the taking, to be taken with only a simple prayer like this one:

"God just let me love this person like you loved me on the cross."

Enough of those prayers in a row do something to us. C. S. Lewis said that it is not God that prayer changes but ourselves that change when we pray. That is a great insight, but it's not the entire story for me. God has REACTED to my prayer. With enough tireless requests to God for the ability to love others as Christ has commanded and you will be different. Different not because of how the prayers affect your heart, but because of how God affects your heart in answer to those requests.

The first time I sensed a love so deep that I couldn't really comprehend the whole thing all at once I just wept. It was uncontrollable because I knew that I had forever been changed from whoever I was, and days have been the same since. They've been different because nowhere has there been a person not worth loving since, and at no time has there not been enough love to go around. The love is dynamic and keeps welling up like that spring that is supposed to well up into eternal life. And whatever is welling up inside seems real enough and eternal enough too.

So I stand there looking out at who I have been given to care for, and smile. After I take my shoes off hours later I'm still smiling. Smiling and wondering. Wondering what I can do to bring this one or that to a point where they can feel this alive. Sometimes it gets frustrating because there is no way to get everyone here now. A blessing this big is a mixed blessing because it requires so much patience to watch people I have learned to love deeply flounder around not getting it. Not getting how deeply God loves us and what it feels like to live with even just a tiny piece of that inside.

How can I tell them? What can I say to him? When should I call? What should I read to her? How can I set up a meeting between these two that share so much? How can I get out of God's way even further, and just let Him do what only He can do? These are the challenges of the heart. This is what all the excitement is about. Not knowing what outrageous thing that God will do next is the fun of it all, and no matter how much I've come to expect it, He blows me away with creativity and surprise each time.

It seems that soon my tiny missionary's apartment will be given to another, and I will have laundry facilities and a kitchen again. But the simplicity of my live walking with God will remain because I know too much to go back in peace. There is no place to run without finding God there smiling at me because He knows I know too much. And the thought of that makes me smile more than anything else that He shows me.

Sometimes I can't stop smiling and weeping a little inside, smiling, weeping and smiling with a tear or two, then smiling again. And that's just the way life gets when it is too filled to put to words and too bright to focus on without squinting a bit. That's just what happens when you spend just a few too many minutes with God. I just have to wish it on my worst enemy, because there is no way to stop loving even the worst, even if I tried, which I wouldn't anyway, so there's nothing more to say.

© Copyright 2001, Douglas Decicco, 3230 NE 9th Terrace, Pompano Beach, FL - This writing may be duplicated and distributed freely provided the following three restrictions are adhered to during the duplication and distribution of said writing, regardless of the number of recursive duplications or distributions made:
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