The Hope Journey

That night, before I turned my lights out, I grabbed my picture-journal and drew a heart. It was a perfectly shaped, generic heart—plain dark ink in the middle of a solid white page, like the front of a valentine card. I drew a couple of circles around it to represent string that had gotten tangled around the heart. I added more circles and scribbles here and there to represent knots. Each time I stopped and looked at it, I thought, No, that’s not enough. Then I added more circles, more tangles and more knots. I kept scribbling dark lines around that little heart until it looked like a good representation of the way I felt inside. When I was finished, I started to cry. With lips quivering I prayed out loud for the first time in a long time, “Lord, there is so much work to do. There are so many lies to untangle. There are so many knots to unravel. I thought, in my weariness, I was losing my strength to fight, but you have given me new hope. Now I see this image and I am reminded that my heart is suffering and I cannot become free on my own. So, help me to take one day at a time. Help me to never give up this fight, this journey, for new life, so that my heart can really live again.” I ran my fingers over the tangles drawn out on the page. There were so many that I could hardly tell where any of the lines started or ended. The same was true with the lies in my heart. I knew that it would take a long time to unravel the mess, but I believed something that night that I had lost sight of earlier that day—that this fight for healing, for new life, no matter what it requires from me, is worth it!