When December Comes And Your Heart is Full of Cracks

I spent an afternoon in the woods.  I was overwhelmed with the graces and faces of my Creator God in all of the smallest, unseen pieces of forest land.  Time slowed, sun rays melted over amber leaves, and I was pulled into the beauty.

All around me, the scene was playing out of nature's last curtain call just before the bitterness of winter winds would whip through barren trees; so much color, so much texture, so much life dangling all around me.

But truly, it was a fade of life that I was witnessing.  The end of a season pressing towards the beginning of the next.  The browning and curling of leaves were markers of life-ending.  Faded flowers, fallen timber, and broken seed pods told the story of purpose.

I was struck at the core of what God has been tenderly teaching me.  The seasons of my life are changing.  I am not a stagnate soul.  I am growing and stretching out in this skin of purpose that God is weaving over my life.  I am learning the ebb and flow of time and the intimacy of walking with Him.

I see these beautiful dried flowers in the field.  I am struck at their beauty even in their death.  I am drawn by the whisper of God to go deeper still into this walk and understand that this season of endings I see before my eyes is the pathway to glorious beginnings.  The crushing of seeds, the whipping of winds, and the fading of beauty at the moment is a bridge to something beautiful and new in its own time.

And then I pause.  Maybe the cracking of a soul, the breaking of a heart, the crashing of a dream should be put before this lens.  Maybe the journeys that we take and the sorrow that we bear really are a beautiful testament of love preparing us all along for a glorious rebirth. Maybe broken hearts are the best hearts because they are cracked open so love can saturate and grow, spilling grace to the world around us.  

A seed can only grow in cracked and broken ground.  It is in the breaking that life erupts.

Sometimes, living seems so bitter.  Sometimes, it doesn't seem much like living.  But it is in those hardest moments that are released into the hands of God that beauty abounds.  And when the stillness comes, assurance follows, knowing that in the hardest pressing- God was ever-present.  His redemption working in the cracks.

His heavy hand of love is cradling the cracked heart, and He is breathing hope into the soul.  He is breaking the ground for a harvest yet to be seen. But He knows.  He is the Lord of the harvest, and He is making way for the bounty that shall spring forth from a heart cracked open to His redemptive hand.

And like the golden rays of autumn sun splash through wooded arms, the rays of hope wrap the tender limbs of creation and of me.  I see the beauty in the cracks.  They are being emptied of flaws while being filled ever so gently with thick and hope-filled Love.  This Love is from a Savior that was cracked opened and spilled to fill my deepest gashes.

And all of the dry bits...the dead bits, are split open for true life to spring forth.  And though a fading of this moment must take place, the promise of redemption rumbles certain just beneath the visible.  For time will tell the story when spring winds will again whip through this same forest.  Green shoots will appear through the wintered ground.  Life will burst again onto the scene, and this barren and browned set of woods will be the picture of new life.  And just as bared bark will again shoot tender branches, cracked hearts will bubble with life when offered to the Healer. Life after the winter season has a certain softened joy, a proven hope, an eternal promise to render beauty in the broken.

I lift a humble hand to the sky.  My soul is resolute in hope.  How could I miss it?  The whole of creation tells the story of breaking, releasing, and transforming.  When my heart is tilled like soil and left exposed to the elements, the harvest is not yet known, but the promise is certain.

A cracked heart is the best heart of all.