We can choose to allow God to thaw and heal all of our hearts or only portions.
Our little town was blessed with two snow days last week. The first was exciting for most people. The snow came down throughout the early morning and when it stopped, it was play time. But, it wasn’t one of those stick around for days, snows for many of us.
In most spots, the sun melted the majority of it away by late afternoon. However, we are a rural town and we have lots of shady spots that are off of the beaten path. Those spots and roads, kept the snow wet and frozen and so when the temperatures dropped back into the low twenties, those spots froze solid making driving conditions very dangerous.
Those conditions bought us a second snow day even if there wasn’t much snow left.
Personally, I couldn’t have been happier about the extra day as I was buzzing around my house cleaning and straightening and doing little chores that I never seem to have the time to do these days, when the roof over the landing to my front door, caught my eye.
One side was completely melted, not a drop of snow or ice, remained, yet the other side was still mostly covered in snow. It was clear that the sun was shining directly on one side, but its warm, thawing rays were not reaching the other.
I had a hard time looking away because the two halves were so very different.
Now, over the past few years, God has taught me a lot from roofs, from helping to remove them and replace them on mission trips, to a tree falling on my roof in all the safest places during a hurricane, so I wanted to pay close attention to what He was trying to tell me.
The answer that kept coming was, that roof is like our hearts. We have different areas and parts of them. When we decide to surrender our hearts to Jesus, there’s always lots of heart work to do. Humans are flawed and broken and we inevitably hurt each other often, whether intentionally or not.
We sometimes carry those heart injuries long after they were incurred. We sometimes carry them for a lifetime. Most of us will allow healing for some of the injuries like the side of the roof where the sun was shining. But, often we will continue to cling to the deepest hurt, anger, shame or resentment, not allowing Jesus to shine His light on those parts. So, they stay frozen and prevent us from living, loving and trusting fully.
Yet, Jesus calls us to more. He calls us to trust Him, to hand over all of our hearts and let Him shine His light and love on all of the parts. He wants to heal us completely, so we can be totally free, not just mostly free.
A partially snow covered roof reminded me that when walking with Jesus, mostly is not enough. He wants to heal all of our hearts and for us to let go of the past so we can embrace the future with Him. Perhaps you needed reminding
too.
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂