Bring A Helmut

Is it better to have a spotless house and complete order, but a shortage of snuggles? Or an abundance of snuggles and a deficiency in order?

Visit my house most days, and you'll see I'm choosing the abundance of hugs, with extra helpings of little boy kisses. If you could peek in, you'd hear lots of singing, watch a ridiculous amount of dancing, and you'd overhear some precious sentiments exchanged between me and that Tater Tot. You'd smell a large pile of dirty laundry and your socks would collect dust along the wooden floors. You'd find a table smeared in Shawn's prints with yesterdays yogurt. You would have to step over the toys and books to find a spot on the crumb covered sofa. You'd find almost nothing in its "proper" spot. Ok, that's an exaggeration. You'd find a lot of things in their proper, messy spot. But, my house is the easy thing to figure out.

If you could crawl into my heart and sit a spell, you might enjoy high doses of tenderness before being utterly suffocated. Sometimes this love feels like a seizure and I'm stuck between enjoying the oddity of it, and the pain of wishing I didn't have to feel it so severely. (I know a little bit about mild seizures.) I guess it borders on darkness to think that sometimes my heart just feels like it can't take it anymore. It's that old saying, "love hurts". It does. But we can't live without it. My heart...it's a mess in there sometimes.

If you could squeeze a spy-cam into my mind, you might observe that eery calm before the storm, with an occasional gust of wind that you never saw coming. It's always all a twhirl up there. (I think I just made up a word. My mind isn't gonna let me visit dictionary.com right now because it just doesn't care if I made up a word, or used a legitimate one incorrectly.) It cares more about where my love is going, if it is moving in the right directions. It often isn't. It saturates certain areas of my life and leaves other areas hung out to dry. It boggles and frustrates me because I want it to all go in the right direction. My mind...it's a mess in there sometimes.

Sometimes my mind feels disconnect from my heart, thinking my way through life, the next steps, the consequences, the plans, the details. Other times my mind is absent and my heart is light and swelled like a floating balloon, with pride. Or it's heavy like a rock that I cannot pick up. Can they ever just walk this journey hand in hand? Does anyone do this well?

I sure wish both my head and my heart could constantly move toward Christ, without ever veering off of His path, without seizing up, without having to weather some scary storms. Or maybe it does, and this is all just part of it.

I wish you could spend some time in my heart or in my mind without needing a helmut, or a seatbelt, or a tranquilizer gun.