When We Speak Our Minds, But Hide Our Hearts

Hazard lights flash, as an officer coasts past, watching the well-dressed woman risk her life to post a political sign on the side of a busy street.

We are all sign-posters, really, daily…..Of what we believe and why.

No, we may not risk getting plowed over by speeding metal contraptions, but…

We all risk losing much, when we live with words tall and erect…placing what we believe on a stick, instead of pricking eachothers hearts first.

Like Hunger Games, mud slinging and tug-o-war, fighting for concrete answers to world problems all caught in a web, intertwined into a thousand mindsets, cultures, and belief systems.

But, what about the heart?

What happens to the world when we only tell our thoughts? Do we use our intellect, opinions, and research to hide what most needs reaching? 

Like a contractor laying cement, do we place man-made foundations over bubbling manta, hidden underneath?

When will we all dare to go deeper, bypassing the surface to find the core of who we really are?

When will we all get brave enough to search for something more, tire of rhetoric and opinions that divide, without recognizing we are all living, breathing humans on the inside?

What if we all shared on an even playing ground first, person-to-person, not machines puking out information, trying to destroy other “outdated models” with our own grandiose notions of how we think things were meant to be?

I see a man blowing a trumpet in what appears to be an old, graffitied church. I happened to go the backway to Children’s Hospital this day, as I recognize, our little ones have needs we cannot cure ourselves.

There. He trumpets. As if a warning, drawing the many cars on this backstreet to recognize the need, next to University District.

A building boarded up, marks of hate slashed across it. Grass overgrown, a fence in front of a place that likely once was holy and sacred.

I turn back around, risk being late for my appointment because there is something earth-shaking about a man who spends his days pointing us to broken things. 

I look at Him longer, this time imagining, “What is he thinking? Why is he doing this?”

I roll my window down to listen. “Taps” is what he is playing; sorrowfully, bitterly…A song heard at funerals and memorials.

My heart weeps while broken glass and charred bricks look back at me, mocking their seeming victory.

I think of the trumpets in Scripture. This sacred building distroyed, forgotten as hundreds pass, pretending they haven’t see it….

Why can’t the world hear the sound of the trumpet announcing the grave call from someone crying deeper.

Why? Why do we pass them daily? The scared and abused. The wounded, lost and forgotten. The aching soldiers grieving over what yesterday stole from them.

I know now, it is in not a coincidence I am driving to the Hospital.

Hospital’s are refuges of healing. This is a place where a Neurologist will look past what is seen on the surface, eventually doing a brain scan to see what’s the reason for outward abnormalities.

We all need healing. We all need The Good Physicial. We all need the Trumpet’s Blaring, pointing us to the core of our beings.

It wasn’t just a cross, and a death, and a resurrection.

We often see the act, but miss the purpose. Ackowledge Easter but remain in layers of flesh, holding in secrets while listening to a gospel message, fully missing it’s power, His purpose?

How do we talk and scold, “educate” and enlighten other individuals, but not find the time to respect differences, stop, ask, and sit with those who play the trumpets in our lives with warning and urgency, announcements and disheartening truth we might not feel comfortable hearing?

Do we all just race in traffic, flurry to plant our words on a sign in the grass along the freeway, then “satisfied”, hurry and scatter away?

Have we become “sign posters” every day on social media?

Have we become cold and scarred, overburdened and barren in our heartlessness, missing the message of a gospel, that brought a God/man down to meet us….

Not in religion or theology, but naked and barren, facing our naked and barren hearts, looking upon us desperately from the cross?

Why do we still live in the garden, clothing ourselves in shame, hiding, masking who we really are, instead of living free, fully loving for the sake of a gospel that always put relationship over one-sided dictations.

Self-righteousness burns buildings down.

It paints the walls of one anothers hearts, and leaves our inner places broken, so charred until we don’t need officials, because we put up our own fences….never letting anyone in.

Oh friend, I don’t want a gospel that offends by words of hate, to force a gospel of lovelessness down into the pits of hearers who have plugged their ears for decades because love wasn’t laced within.

Isn’t it only His grace that softens, His power that can leak forth and change other people?

Why have we become soldiers who kill with words, instead of lovers of Jesus who let the gospel heal the depths of other people?

When will we live fearless to go deepers? Ask about not just one another’s acts, but the motives of the heart that lead eachother towards decisions, we may not happen to agree with?

Jesus asked great questions. Yet, we throw swords in the wounded and think we are somehow living the gospel?

I long desperately to sit with the trumpet player as I pass by with my little one on the way to the hospital. I am drawn to get behind the chainlink fence, sit in that deplorable places where surely Jesus would have been….

Because when one sits lonely, we all become lonely.

Because I am the first to say, I have been that same wreckage. I have been the paint sprayer, the window breaker, the sign placer, the heartless hater, destroying Kingdoms that were instead only meant to rise.

But Jesus came and sat with me.

He waited patiently, asked the right questions, and let my heart truly bleed, right into the fullness of His once pierced hands.

And how might my life had changed, if when I was throwing stones, someone representing Jesus stopped and didn’t just “tell me things”, but really saw, loved, and was willing to look deep into the depths of me….

How might the world truly change, if we stopped posting signs….

Just to walk away.