The human heart is a field of desire.
It’s so easy to want God, but then so many other things too. Trying to find Him, we are lost in the fields of desire. How can we enjoy the flowers of the field without getting tangled in the briers? It is unsettling to think that Satan’s bible is too about desire. And yet, the desire of the heart is one of the ways in which God leads us to eternal union with Him. Is there a North Star to guide us through these fields to the One who alone is eternal happiness?
As for me, even when I locate the North Star, remembering to look up at it is like trying to remember that God is there with me in the course of my hectic workday. I tried placing objects and pictures around the office, but then couldn’t remember to look at them. I learned all too soon that God is not in the objects and pictures, any more than He was in the wind or the storm for Elijah. I have learned that it is not a matter of remembering that He is present; rather I should make Him uppermost in my heart and my mind. He should be like the Beloved who permeates the mind and the senses at every moment of my day.
If you have ever fallen in love, then you know what I mean. The beloved is on your heart and in your mind at every moment of every day, no matter what else you are doing. Then, the love shared between lover and beloved begins to burgeon and overflow onto everything and everyone around you. The world and all your relationships literally spring alive with this love! Wouldn’t it be great to think that loving God – finding Him in our hearts – could be like that? After all, He tells us (in no uncertain terms) that there is an intrinsic connection between loving Him and loving each other.
So, if we are seeking to find God in the heart, then we have to fall in love with Him.
But isn’t falling in love with God a little like falling in love with a parent? Stay with me here. The child really doesn’t “fall in love” with parents like one falls in love with a lover, mostly because there is a developmental process to the relationship (just as there is a process to the lover becoming spouse). Parents love their child during a time when the child is not capable of understanding or experiencing love. The child is so profoundly dependent on the parent’s love that his existence is not possible without it. More typically, the child realizes the love for the parent at some momentous moment down the path of life — maybe at a time of tragedy, or a time of realizing, from the heart, all that the parent has sacrificed. Before that time, the child can only receive love. When the child separates, matures, becomes independent, then it is possible to recognize the profundity of the parent’s love, and the response of love is a spontaneous movement of the child’s heart.
Our spiritual childhood may be a little like that. We can’t “fall in love” with God, because He has loved us profoundly at a time when we couldn’t even know Him – since the moment of our creation and throughout the time when all we could do is receive His love. At some momentous moment in our life, though, we realize all that God has done for us – how He has provided for us at every turn and in ways that we didn’t recognize, how He has protected us from dangers we didn’t even know were lurking. Only gradually, little by little, do we become (spiritually) mature enough to realize and respond to His love for us. At that moment, the return of love to Him – as to the beloved parent – is a spontaneous movement of the heart.
So can we make it happen that God becomes uppermost in our hearts? Even as the child is unaware of all that the parent has sacrificed, so perhaps is the person unaware of God until that momentous moment when He makes Himself known to the soul in the way that only He can. At that moment the soul’s spontaneous love for God will transcend the bounds of a human heart hitherto lost in the temporal world.
