Our hearts cannot live apart of my hope. I am living proof of this. To be detached from things that you used to trust and to be left floating like a boat out in the water. When you were fastened to the dock, you didn't have to worry about the strength of your sail or the rudder but now you find yourself wondering whether today will be calm or storm. There can be an impending fear that takes over you when no longer have lines fastening you to a place you are used to. You raise your sail for the first time, watching it flutter and fill out and feel the wind pulling your boat forward with a quiet exhilaration. You are moving in a certain direction and you wonder where the wind is taking you. And so your hand finds the tiller and you adjust your rudder and see how the bow draws itself across the horizon. The rudder and sail are the first things you trust and your heart begins to slowly wrap itself around them and become familiar with them. When the storms come, they only cause your heart to cling more tightly to these things and your heart sends it roots deeper into their surface. Though even then you still fear the storm and you feel deeply in your heart that you can use your sails and rudder but there is a power beyond you that could overwhelm you. Your heart clings to the aspects of the boat for stability but all these live and move over the ocean and your heart slowly comes to realize that while it can control the sailboat, it can't control the ocean. The heart wonders, "Then who controls the ocean?" And what would it be like to sink your heart's roots into the one who made the ocean?
Our hearts cannot live apart from hope. And this is evidenced by how we lay in bed at night and wish our day had gone differently. We wish we had used different words. We wish we had not spend all day thinking about ourselves. We wish there was greater richness in our friendships. We wish so many things and our heart feels like a tree that wishes it would rain so that it could drink and not be thirsty. Why such thirst if there was not water that could satisfy it? Hope is born out of this thirst. All of our hearts are thirsty and so we begin tying ourselves to things that help quench our hearts. We lie in our beds at night or when we wake up and we wonder what could quench the longings of our hearts. There are those who do not lie in their beds at night and wonder this and I believe it could be because they are tied so tightly into their slip of security that they have forgot what is to have their boat placed at the mercy of the ocean or rather to have their heart placed at the mercy of God. They have sheltered themselves from the natural elements which force the heart to confront its' true thirst. Everyone is scared to leave their slip though because no one knows what exactly God will do or whether he will bring calmness or storm if all is abandoned to him. And so we sit in our slips and do not risk the ocean. In doing so, we keep our hearts from the very reason we were made.
My desire is that my heart would sink itself into the one who made the ocean and I would be tied to him in love. Storm or calm, I do not care. I want to be willing to leave my slip and risk the ocean because anything else would be to deny my existence and to deny that he created me for Himself. God calls every heart to abandon itself to him. To say, "Lord, WHATEVER you want, I am yours. I will cast myself upon you. Make me yours." Only when every tie is cut, can the sailboat leave the slip. And if my heart is stubborn and does not have the courage to cut the final cord, I pray that God would send a wind to pull me until that cord is snapped and I am loosed fearfully into the open water. It takes an abandoned heart to take a knife to the cords on your boat as the world is crying out and scoffing at your foolishness, "Why would you set sail?!" The answer is obvious, "Because I am a boat and I was meant to!" There must be a greater voice that is calling you in your heart in order for you to ignore the voice of the world. The ocean calls us and we hold a knife in our hands. The ropes are taut in our slips. Our sails are waiting to catch the wind. And the Maker of the ocean is waiting to reveal himself to those he created for himself.
"And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statues of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good?" Deuteronomy 10:12-14
