Living Ink II

This beating mass of red pushes from my chest. The hope flowing in my veins, the pain intermingled. And I wouldn’t change any of it.

There’s a lot of things said about the heart in the Bible. That we need to keep His word in our hearts, to guard them from evil, like in Proverbs 4:23, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Psalm 73:26 says “My flesh and heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Our hearts are frail and imperfect; they leave us feeling incomplete. When we are cut and broken down we bleed the red that represents our sin. This is why God says in Ezekiel 11:19 “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.” He transforms us in a way so that when we are broken in this life we may not bleed red but bleed life, hope, and endurance.

We can choose to believe in God and not really show it. We can allow Him into our hearts yet not allow Him to touch anything, like in a museum, like a visitor. But living faith is when you let your heart become one with God and that anything you do or say is a reflection of His heart. We cannot do this perfectly of course, but this is what I strive to do with my writing. When troubles come in this life and I bleed, I make sure my pain and how I deal with it is reflecting the one whose heart I wish to follow. I take my transformed heart and create living ink. Words that aren’t just symbols on a page but ones that speak love and hope, ones that do something.

I want to show the depressed soul that there is a God who loves her, that she matters. I want to show the woman who has lost all emotions and is out of touch with reality that there is truth and freedom to feel in Jesus Christ. I want to set the captives of the mind free. I want to reach into the darkest corners of the world where they put the psychopaths and supposed “lost causes,” show them my beating heart, stains of sin and hurt and all, and show them what life is. Only Jesus Christ can free us. Only He can give us eternal healing, show us the light, transform our way of thinking into something beyond ourselves and our circumstance.

Freedom comes from God. It is not given to us by the government or any other worldly power. And it is this freedom that I wish for others to know. To be able to get out of bed in the morning no matter how awful you feel because God has a plan for you. To be able to find peace among stress because the first thing you turn to is the Bible. When you focus on God, your problems suddenly are smaller. When you love God and know that He loves you and created you, life doesn’t seem pointless but rather quite incredible, because you know that everything is happening for a reason. He turns the evil of this world to good, and now when I’m in the midst of a trial I can see it. I can see Him working and I listen to what He’s teaching me. It’s not that I don’t feel pain but it’s that I realize the pain matters to God and He will use it in a way that always surprises me.

So when I am cut whether by sword or word, let my faith be what comes out. May the Lord let me teach others to live this way, to live out faith with living ink.