Softening of the heart: The extraordinary in the ordinary! 

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive. – Charlotte Bronte

I know only too well what it’s like to live with a heart like a stone! Utterly snared by what some of my friends on the journey call the bondage of self. Nothing is more destructive to any attempt at the good life—living your best life—than this pernicious, soul destroying, love dismantling, spiritual disorder.  

The other night I burst into tears as I shared with some folks on the spiritual quest, two of my recent encounters with the living God. The first was when one of my sons arrived from afar, and my tears flowed freely as we embraced. A couple of days later came another God moment, when I wept again as I held this much-loved son in my arms, kissed his check, and then tearfully watched him depart. 

For when the heart gets changed, everything changes.

This was not, as they say, “my first rodeo” with tears from the heart. On one level, there is nothing extraordinary about a father weeping with love for one of his sons. But for a fella like me who spent so long in the dark void of hard-heartedness, this now familiar world of soft-hearted living, with its regular outpouring of tears, still strikes me as truly miraculous. It is a fully fledged God deal of the extraordinary in the ordinary! The reason for this is that I’ve been a recipient of a deep and enduring change in feeling and outlook. I’m not the hard-hearted man I once was, and this transformation has everything to do with the way God has transformed my heart; (Ezek 36: 26). For when the heart gets changed, everything changes.

Helen Keller said: 

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched, but are felt in the heart.

The great mystic Julian of Norwich said, “The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.” I try not to be too definitive in my misfit mystic musing about the life-giving Spirit. After-all, no one has ever seen God. She is a deep mystery to the simple human mind and emerges as love in no end of creative ways to all manner of people (1 John 4:12). But I have become convinced that finding this love in the ordinary is paramount. If our focus is waiting for choirs of angels—you know—to get whisked off to the heavenly places, we may be in for a long wait and miss all the beauty of heaven in the here and now that already exists in our hearts. 

When tears of love flow freely, comrades, we are as close to heaven as we will ever be. In fact, we have arrived! We’ve in the heart space, the very place where God hangs out and changes us from the inside-out. May our tears of the heart flow like a living stream, for in them is the true sign that the change of heart that is so central to the spiritual journey is in well and truly in full flow. The extraordinary is indeed in the ordinary!