But for some reason, my heart is broken tonight. My heart is broken and exposed, and I don't like the look of it. I see gooey black masses of pride, and I see hypocrisy, and I see all the things that I don't want to be.
So there comes an idea. I will take my heart and bring it out of it's cool dark corner where it has been festering and take it out on the streets of Portland. There I will put my heart on the sidewalk and feel what it is like to be out from the places that I call comfortable. So that is what I have done. For three weeks I tried to get inside the mind and emotions of a street kid and what they love and what they hate. I have seen things that have made my sheltered little mind shudder with horror. I have felt pain like the kind that comes from violently ended love. I have seen humanity in the light of the calloused, pompous and pharisetical snobs that we can so often be. I have never been so scared in all my life.
Scared you ask? Scared because I see the worst of all of it in my own life. I see the blond that covers her eyes so she doesn't see the street kid, I see the meth addicts' sagging eyes and glassy stare. I see that in me. And I am scared.
So here I sit looking at my heart again. There are little grits of sand and gravel from the concrete where my heart has been these last few weeks, there are spots of blood where it has been scraped and bruised. I am not sure what is better, the sleepy pride, or this ragged love-pain.
But then I open my Bible. I try to get a picture of the heart of Jesus. There on those thin paper pages a picture begins to appear of the heart of my Lord Jesus. Then I cry. I cry because I see what his heart looked like. I cry when I hear him say that he came for the least of these, those who need the doctor and not those who think they have it all together.
I cry because i ever asked the question, because I ever thought that apathy might be better. The heart of Jesus is so broken and torn, it is so dirty and bruised that it is misshapen and battered. He is my Lord, and that is what my heart should look like.
It is time I take my heart out of it's box and but it where my Lord put his. Right smack in the middle of the pain, need, tears, and the wounds.
Then will I live a life worth living.
Then will the air be worth breathing.
Then will my heart be worth keeping.
--- Aaron Dodson, Revolutionary Media, Media Coordinator
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