I know your heart
I know your heart.
That’s what my friend says, after I have rattled off a dozen questions at her, an interrogation like bullets flying, too fast, my thumbs shooting out over a digital keyboard.
I am working when I see and respond to my friend’s message, sent because she too is working, both of us pressed. A time crunch can crush a bruised reed, or a vulnerable friend, when margin-less hurry begets a virus of the eyes.
Technology makes it a little too easy for me to let a reaction become a response.
It hasn’t been an easy week, as it turns out, for either of us, but while my friend pauses anyway to see me, at first, I can see no further than my own weary body, my own busy mind, my own cluttered heart. What modifiers, that nasty my, that selfish own, like a door slamming on its hinges with a double smack, again, again, again, locking us away from each other. Funny how two tiny words can build a deadly insular space.
Your eye is the lamp of your body, Jesus taught. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore, be careful, lest the light in you be darkness.
My lexicon says that the Biblical Greek word haplous, used in this passage to describe the eyes, in some translations rendered healthy and in others clear, literally means “’without folds’, referring to a singular, undivided focus.” Be careful, the Spirit whispers through the Word, lest the light in you actually be darkness, because the things filling your time, the things folding your focus and segmenting it into parts, the things that can blind you like planks, corrupting your sight, can even be things we humans would describe as good.
It can be tempting to believe that the cure for ill eyes—for that word translated bad in the teaching of Christ can mean diseased—is to focus on the right thing, when the actual truth is that all my wholeness will forever be bound up in a focus on the right person, namely Christ, who heals and gives sight.
Religious leaders, in a story Jesus told, ostensibly busy, their minds filled with religious work, walked right by a man bleeding out in a ditch. His blood mixed with the mud and the buggy rainwater. The man in the ditch, who had been robbed and beaten and then discarded and left for dead, might as well have been invisible to those walking the moral high ground. The story still makes me a little uncomfortable, because while I don’t like to think of myself as someone so easily preoccupied, I’ll tell you, I can be out running errands and lose my heart to rushing responsibilities. There’s a reason we call it running, and it can make a person go blind.
If you know the story, this may be the moment when your mind begins to make arguments regarding reasons (not pertaining to you or me) that the religious leaders not only ignored the man in the ditch but crossed to the other side of the road without breaking stride. It’s not that those details aren’t important, but I’m learning to be wary of my own desire, even in the listening, to distance myself from the situation. And anyway, the point is that I am also the man in the ditch, and that Christ is the only one who does not ever, for any reason, ignore my wounds.
I am not running errands when my friend’s email comes in, though. Sitting at my computer, I scan my friend’s message in a flash and grab my phone, downshifting into text, rattling off my interrogation with hardly a pause. My words aren’t ugly, they are un-seeing. Talk like that can make a person invisible.
In my better moments, I imagine my friend’s faces while I’m texting and smile so widely Riley wants to know why.
“What, Mom?” She often says, when I haven’t even been aware she’s watching, because she can see by my smile that my friends and I share something deliciously rich, and she wants a taste.
But this is not one of those times, will not be, anyway, because I hardly pause long enough to imagine or conjure or embody my friend at all before I send my questions flying.
There is a moment in the book of Acts that could have happened on any routine day, when Peter and John walked to the temple as they always did, as scores of others always did, for prayer, and they passed a begging man who had been there for so long no one ever looked at him much anymore. I imagine the beggar murmuring something like help, any help, please, his voice droning out words that men at the intersections of our roadways now scrawl on battered pieces of cardboard. Peter and John stopped in front of him and said something truly odd, look at us, as though they wanted him to know he was seen, as part of tending his soul.
Something about being seen, knowing we’re seen, resolves doubts about significance and confusion about love.
“I want someone to know I’m here,” Fredrik Backman’s character, Britt-Marie explains, in Backman’s wonderful novel Britt-Marie Was Here, which tells the quirky story of a woman named Britt-Marie who more than anything just wants what all humans want, her personhood, to be seen and heard and known. She wants friends who know her heart, friends who, in saying so, will remind her that she’s neither invisible nor alone.
No way, friend! I know your heart, my friend sends back, after I, suddenly arrested by my own darkness, apologize for coming off all wonky, I think I say, or sick at heart, I might’ve said better. Suddenly I can see her, pausing where I’ve come begging, stopping to really see me and offer me grace.
I stare at the phone in my hand, my thumb lightly scrolling through her text, thinking what a beautiful filter that is for friendship, I know your heart, knowing that kind of seeing could very well shield a soul and free a captive.
I know your heart, or, in other words, I see you. I know you, which, by the way, echoes the voice of God, who has been telling us these things in every way He can since the beginning of time. She sounds like Him, and just now, seeing singularly Him while she’s texting with me, it comes naturally to her to show me His kindness and compassion.
How are you? I ask after a pause, slowing my fingers, suddenly smiling as the light rushes in, and as though in the seeing we are at last sitting side-by-side, she begins to give herself away.
