There are many hiding places in the heart. There are compartments, dark corners, nooks, and crannies. Compartments come in many shapes and sizes. They often contain to-do lists, work details, holiday plans, and the like. These compartments are easy to access. They are typically pleasant, if not monotonous, places to visit. The dark corners, nooks, and crannies are less friendly. Sometimes dusty and unkempt, these places in the heart hold memories; some pleasant, some preferred to be forgotten, or some softened with age, but still revisited occasionally for nostalgia’s sake. Sometimes these nooks and crannies hold things that caused embarrassment, shame, and guilt that we shelved away in boxes and were quickly forgotten. Maybe situations that were not resolved to our liking are stored here, to be resurrected and stewed over again and again. These places can usually be safely revisited and forgiven, even laughed at once the sting is gone.

However, carefully tucked away in a little-visited corridor of the soul is the heavily locked door, maybe many doors. These doors are toxic and forbidden. The corridors leading to them are oftentimes lined with traps, snares, and distractions to keep the unwanted visitor out, to protect, control, and deny entrance. If somehow the corridor is navigated and the traps avoided, the doors themselves are well armored to repel intruders. Thick and impenetrable, ugly, and seeping, these doors are repulsive with a cloying scent of decay and primal fear. The keyholes are rusted with disuse, and the hinges are stuck shut.

Somewhere in a closed-off part of your heart, you sense that all is not well down there in the deep recesses of the soul. You do remember. You can navigate the traps and snares in the long-ignored passageways because you put them there. With a disconcerting sense of focus, you walk the corridor that leads to the forbidden places. You will control them. As you stand in front of your door in a rare surge of bravery, you unlock it and force the door to open. The heavy keys clink to the filthy ground as they fall from your fingers. An overwhelming sense of hopelessness, sickness, and fear blow past you, as the toxic, decay-filled air swirls, threatens, and mocks.

“You can’t fix this,” a voice whispers, “it is far too late.” The boxes and bundles you see inside are angry, weeping wounds that none of your heavy bandaging seemed to stop. How long have you been bleeding like this? You worked so hard to cover, heal, and deal with these wounds! You bound them up tightly with the bonds of denial, saturated them with the balm of self-reliance, murmuring rote words of Christianese over them, willing them with your mind to stop seeping, stop oozing their filth. Yet somewhere far down, in your deepest soul, you know it didn’t work. You are still bleeding.

You venture in through the door a bit further, taking in all the chaos and violence that is trapped here. The door slams shut. Darkness is overwhelming, and taunting voices grow louder, shouting that you have no way out and that these wounds will never heal. The loneliness is palpable, and despair is closing in, threatening to remove all hope. Yet above the din of raucous laughter, you hear it; faint at first, but growing stronger, louder, and more insistent. Someone is knocking on the closed door! You see light on the other side! Stumbling, tripping, falling, you wrench the door wide, and there on the threshold of your vile door is the Light! This Light is not repelled by the darkness, the seeping, and the stench. It dispels it.

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”¹

“Eat with me? In here? It is horrible, unsafe, and unclean,” you say. “I’m too ashamed to let You enter into this place.” The Light enters anyway, pushing through all the decay, fear, and chaos. As the Light passes by each of your weeping, oozing boxes, He stops and looks carefully and fully at all the damage wrapped up inside the haphazardly bandaged bundles. He sees it all. He never looks away. He sees every word, every action, and act of violence. He sees all the fear and hurt that created each wound. He acknowledges the pain and panic of all of it, and you begin to feel that heavy burden lift from your shoulders. He has taken it. He doesn’t turn away from the ooze and mess. He doesn’t look at your face with eyes of disgust and dismissal. Instead, the Light reaches into His robe of white and pulls out a lovely crystal bottle that shimmers and dances in the light of the Light. “These are your tears. I catch every single one. I rejoice over all of them because I turn them into your treasures.”

He turns back to the boxes and bundles and begins to bind them up and heal them, one by one. The rags of denial are replaced with linens of pure white, the balm of self-reliance is wiped away, and in its place, the oil of gladness is massaged in, bringing hope and wholeness. As He works, songs and words of Heaven pour from His lips. Healing. When He is finished, the stench and ooze are gone, replaced with spicy scents of freshness that hint at renewal and rebirth. You see this once forbidden, closed-off room as a renewed place of hope, testimony, and strength. There are crystal bottles lining the shelves where once your pain and secrets hid. In the center of your exposed and now beautiful room, you see a table is set, where you are invited to quench your hunger and thirst with the One who heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. “Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”²

¹ Revelation 3:20 ² Psalm 34:8

Photo credit: Dylann Hendricks