He came home through the laundry room door and I didn't turn to acknowledge that he was home. For nearly an hour I had been conjuring up imaginary scenarios rationalizing his being late. Deep down I knew my stories were a game, not reality, but the mind is a powerful tool, this day a tool of destruction and misleading. I listened to the reasons for his lateness with bitterness filtering every word he said because by then my heart was wound into knots, angry. I believed what he was saying but couldn't get my soul to unwind from the mess and let it go. I played back every episode of Oprah I'd ever seen where she interviews a heartbroken wife and asks didn't you just have a feeling? And didn't you just make excuses for him? And I sat before my mind's judge, Oprah, and was ready to boast in my throwing stones of accusation. But my heart wasn't broken. I'm in a faithful and loving relationship and my trust in my husband is paramount. The soul-knots were warping my truth.
My emotions are tangled and messy. Like Caleb's untied shoelaces. They flop around and get stepped on and dragged through mire and in an effort to protect them, to tie them up and guard them, guard me, I make tight messy knots of my insides. But I know right, I know the truth so I try to talk myself out of the knots and the ugly gnarl that is in me. No matter what my head says to my heart the words do little to unravel sticky stuck knots. I melt and boil and sink deep into my chair, arms crossed stagnant. I wrestle myself into a lose-lose situation. Then my four tiny mirrors begin to reflect my pouting and only then I recognize, finally, that I have a different need.
I need a dad who will sit down with me and work out the knots that have overtaken my laces, a dad who understands my mood and gets that life's not fair and who cares about resolution and straight laces; hearts not jumbled and bitter and mad. In the middle of the stewing and ripping and me trying to fix me and set shoes to go again, my Dad reaches to draw me out of the grumpy chair and sits down with me and begins kneading the knots in my soul, setting them straight to be tied properly so I can gear up to do His work again.
My heart is like shoelaces. Always rebellious and distracted by every sticky weed.
"So cut away the thick callouses from your heart and stop being so willfully hardheaded. God, your God, is the God of all gods, he's the Master of all masters, a God immense and powerful and awesome." (Deut 10: 16 The Message)
