When Your Heart Starts Beating Again

On the morning that the snow was coming down all sleet and icy in gray October sky, she came. 

She knocked on my front door, and we asked her in.  We asked her to sit down and would she join us for a moment? Join these six kids of mine and a friend and I, all sitting around the kitchen table having hot chocolate, and tea and coffee.  We were reading John chapter 3 while some kids were hanging upside down from couches. Some were wildly running.  And some were finding wool hats to put on so that the moment I said that we were finished they could run out into the snow/sleet whirl and enjoy a taste of the first glimpse of winter.  When she arrived we were almost done.  Almost done for the day with our Bible study time, and here she was, like she had been invited to the party.

Like she had heard some unseen voice whispering to come in.  So, she knocked and she came.

I don’t really know her.  I don’t really know her story, just enough to make you want to close your ears and not hear any more of it. 

I know that she overdosed around 6 times.  On crack. On heroin.  I was told they couldn’t find a heartbeat. 

But they brought her back to life.  Again and again.  Her, with her death wish, they kept bringing her back.  She’s  spent an entire lifetime trying to die.  To run from the pain.  She’d been a prostitute for most of her life.  Because that’s what you do when your dad is a pimp.  And that is how you live when you’ve been sold since you were still just a girl, and this by your own father.  When she drinks, she cries about her daddy.  Because a father wound this deep, it can almost cut off your circulation.  Cut off the flow of blood to your heart, like you can live and not really be alive.  Her pimp father died of an overdose long ago but the pain of those wounds keep pulsating. 

And I’ve been praying for her. 

And here she was on a snowy, sleeting October morning, even if only for a moment.

She sits down and we read these words amidst the chaos of my homeschooling six kid life, “For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Yes, she walked in as we were reading John 3:16-17. 

So, I say, “Because God loved us, He came down to meet us in the midst of our pain.  God came down to us, not to condemn us, but to save us, because he loves us.  He sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins to bring us back to God because our sins had separated us from him and he wants us back.  He wants us back.  No matter what we’ve done.  No matter where we are, we can come back to him.  He knew that we could never be good enough on our own, so he sent his perfect Son to be good enough in our place.  To die on the cross for us and make a way to bring us back to His family and all we have to do is to believe this.”

We ended our time in prayer and she went on her way for the day.

But I can’t seem to go mine.  I sit in awe of God and how intricately He weaves the moments of our lives together to speak truth and life into all that He creates.  How His father heart never stops beating for us, chasing us, longing to bring each one of us back to Him, back to the family.  Longing to heal all our broken.

I still don’t know exactly how all this happens. 

I say this to my husband as I try to tell him about the people God has been bringing to my white bread, suburban doorstep, people to love. The older Korean woman who let me pray for her on the street, she brings me egg rolls now.  We hang out and go for Chinese food and talk about God.  The friend of a friend who has a husband addicted to cocaine, she comes too to hear about God.  My neighbor who just came to believe in Christ, has a passion for God that is contagious.   I tell him how these people are just hungry to know God and I all I do is tell them about him and they come in to the feast.

Like they’ve been invited to the party.

Because they have.

And he asks, “Do you think God is bringing revival here?”

“I don’t know.  But I think that this is what happens when your heart starts beating again.  In Costa Rica, this summer, that is what happened to me.  Like my heart just started beating again.”

And when you come to life in Christ, you bring His life with you wherever you go.

In the months leading up the mission trip to Costa Rica this summer, I kept hearing this song Afterlife by Switchfoot.  It became my anthem.  The lyrics say:

Why would I wait till I die to come alive? I’m ready now.  I’m not waiting for the afterlife. 

And I knew that God was telling me a secret.  That I was about to come alive in ways I still don’t fully understand.  When it happened, when the life overtook me like that tidal wave, all I could pray was please God don’t let this stop.  Don’t let your life in me stop when I go home.  And He hasn’t.

Because when your heart starts beating again, you can’t help but just let that life flow through your veins.  When Christ our very life, is that life in us, even the dead start waking.