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Heart Miracles and Forgivings

Heart Miracles and Forgivings

Last updated on: February 18, 2016 at 12:49 pm by Kerry Connelly

Heart Miracles and Forgivings 2016-02-18T12:49:23-04:00 Kerry Connelly

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Back when Jesus was hanging out here on earth, a lot of people demanded miracles. Give us a sign, they said. Prove it.

I confess in my faith life I’m not much different. Prove you love me, Jesus, I find myself saying. Prove it with a miracle.

Because I guess that whole dying on the cross thing just wasn’t enough.

My hubris is downright majestic.

Because when I say, Prove it with a miracle, I’m usually talking about a Powerball kind of miracle, or a smite my enemy kind of miracle. A miracle that will make my life easier and somehow more enjoyable than it might be in the present moment.

But I’ve come to learn that the biggest, most powerful and awe inspiring miracles are actually miracles of the heart. They happen on your insides, in the dark undersides no one can see, and rarely do they make things easier.

In fact, they usually end up with you hanging out in a crumbling homeless shelter with people who may or may not smell, or in a room full of gang members, or — and this is probably the most uncomfortable for some of us — on a staff team with a bunch of conservative Christians, with the sound of David Byrne singing in your head (and you may ask yourself….How did I get here?)

When I talk about heart miracles, I’m not talking about the usual Oprah-esque personal growth stuff, although that’s important and, I believe, a total God thing, too.

I’m talking about The Big Turnarounds. The Once There Was That and Now There’s This. The Awakenings to Truths, as if you’ve been jolted from a deep slumber. The forgivings that warm the frostiest of emotional tundras, warming us even more for their surprise appearance.

I can tell you the exact time I had a massive Big Turnaround, a Heart Miracle of the biggest sort. I was driving down the Parkway, and with one download from God, I went from being a racist and classist asshole to being a perpetrator of social justice, one of those progressive sorts who associate pastors don’t quite know what to do with.

Of course, I didn’t think at the time that I was a racist or a classist, and I didn’t think I needed a heart miracle in that particular area. But God knew, and it set me on a path that has forever changed my life.

Heart miracles sometimes seem to start in your head. Mine did. I was thinking.

I was staring out the passenger side window as we drove past Irvington, a town that borders the Garden State Parkway. The view of Irvington from the Parkway smacks of poverty and crime, gangs and drug deals. Old cars, boarded up windows on untended row houses. I’d driven past that stretch of highway so many times, each with a thank God I don’t live there kind of thought floating through my brain.

So lovely of me. Seriously, I make my momma proud.

That day, though, I’d been thinking of my friend — I’ll call her Donna. She and her husband adopted their foster child, who I will call Davonte. Davonte had been born addicted to a crack-using mother and an imprisoned father. By the time he was just 18-months old, he’d been left alone for 3 days, and when Donna first got him, he’d gorge himself on food, shoving it down his throat faster than he could chew, because he’d already learned that you never know when your mother will disappear for three days and leave you alone with nothing to eat.

Donna and I had spent many an evening over wine and pasta verbally eviscerating Davonte’s mother, so incredibly angry that anyone could do that, sure that there was a special place in hell just for her, certain that God will hate her for an eternity and that his anger for her is complete, all-encompassing and never-ending.

But that day, I felt a new thought inserted into my brain, which then slid down my throat and into my heart, doing untold damage to its stoniness.

God’s not angry AT her, He’s angry FOR her.

Wait. What?

When we think about the wrath of God, we think all fire and brimstone, and we think there’s this big God plucking us bite-sized little folks up like we were miniatures in a really low-budget movie, tossing us into the flames with glee.

But I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think the wrath of God is more like the momma bear kind of wrath. The You mess with my kid you mess with me, kind of wrath. I think his inherent anger is aimed at sin and at Satan and is borne from his ridiculous crazy love for us. Yes, even for crack-addicted mothers who leave their toddlers alone for 3 days, offensive as that may be to those of us who have never been crack-addicted.

Of course, if you’re a mother, or maybe I should say a mother like me, you’ve had your moments where it’s twenty degrees out and your kid has been arguing with you for twenty minutes about why he can’t wear shorts, using annoyingly effective debate techniques for a seven year old, and finally you just throw your hands up in the air and yell, “FINE! FREEZE!!” and then your husband finally comes in to rescue you from insanity and restore order and put pants on your freaking kid.

And maybe sometimes God does that too, says FINE! Use your free will. But that’s why he sent Jesus to fix it for us once and for all. The cross is God’s answer to the world’s insanity, all our misuse of the free will we’ve been given. Jesus is God putting pants on us so we don’t freeze while we’re outside playing.

On that day, as that thought slid down into my heart and started chipping away at its hardness, God’s heart started beating in my chest. And that new, warm heart sent a thought back up my throat and into my brain and, instead of saying, Thank God I don’t live there, my new heart said, People live there. God’s children live there.

And instantly, I was different. And surprised to be different. All of a sudden, my heart broke for the poor; I had compassion for the addict; I understood radical grace.

Soon enough, I found myself hanging out in crumbling homeless shelters, having pizza with gang members, entering the bowels of towns like Irvington, still praying that my car would not breakdown at an inopportune street corner. More importantly, I found a vibrancy there in those places that shattered my comfortable white soccer mom ethos. I stopped being an asshole.

Well, mostly I stopped being an asshole.

And the people that I met in those crumbling walls, those gang members, the people of different racial and socio-economic backgrounds, they have changed my heart even more, and opened my eyes to see the world and myself in a completely different way.

Compassion is not convenient. Social justice is not always popular. But that little miracle that happened to my insides — well. It’s brought me universes away from where I’ve been.

Which is nothing less than the kind of miracle I’d expect from the God of the universe, and his son, Jesus.

A Powerball miracle of the heart.

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