Closing the Case on God’s Heart

“You can’t get close to someone you don’t trust,” a friend said.  Her words carried that ping of truth.

Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes. I’d just described to her a scene I’d envisioned while praying. In the scene, Jesus sat on the high end of a teeter-totter. His face glowed with warmth and mirth. I was a young wisp of a girl, sitting on the low end, balancing a huge globe on my lap. The heavy world kept my end of the plank firmly on the ground.

Jesus said, “Let’s play!”

He meant for me to push up my end. The extra weight on my side made it seem impossible…I shrugged my shoulders and glanced at the globe.

He smiled and said, “That world is as light as a beach ball, you know. One day it will blow away in the wind, because that’s not what really matters.”

I felt stunned. The world was my home. It’s all I knew. I crunched my eyebrows and stuck out a pouty lower lip. “What matters then?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “You and me,” he said tenderly. “That’s all that matters.”

I instantly knew it was also true for every single person that ever lived.

Jesus continued. “I want to teach you to roll that earth back and forth with me on the teeter-totter of life. When difficult things happen, I’ll carry that earth on my side. Other times, I’ll have something for you to do, and I’ll send it over to you. But we can’t play unless you start by rolling the world back to me.”

Now I didn’t actually hear this conversation, but filled in the script based on my understanding of the symbolism. God illustrated something straight out of my childhood. Rolling a ball back and forth on a teeter-totter was a game I played with my friends at the park. It made sense to me. Now God used it to reframe my worldview.

At that time in my life, I was carrying the heaviness of the world inside my soul. The “life experiment,” as I saw it, had gone profoundly awry here on earth. What was God thinking? Why did he risk gambling with freewill? I wanted answers.

He gently revealed that I did not trust Him. The problems around me were not my responsibility. He wanted me to roll the world back to Him. And not just once, but to practice that kind of trust as a way of life.

I took a clean tissue to dry my cheeks.

“You’ve had his heart on trial for quite some time,” my friend’s words touched a pain in my chest.

I nodded. How did she know? More tears gathered. “What can I do about it?”

“You can trust someone if you believe their heart is good.” She offered, pointing the way. An important discussion followed.

That very day, I made a deep spiritual decision almost as important as my initial choice to follow Christ. I closed the case on God’s heart.

Life is not safe. Cruelties and injustices abound. I can’t fix a broken world. I also don’t know what suffering God will require of me. Still, I’m going to stand on the belief that God’s heart is good.

How do I know? Because he created everything for good. Then he came and walked in our humanity. He understood our condition on a cellular level. That actually means a lot to me. After that, He died for all that went wrong. And finally his resurrection points to a much larger story that will ultimately make sense of our tragic temporal ones.

Once you trust someone, it opens the door for relationship. And I’d rather get close to the heart of God, than live with a clenched fist and a discontented heart.

That one decision shredded my “list.”