I drove back from New Mexico recently, after a week of hiking and camping in the desert. My pickup truck was caked with dust by the time I got home. It reminded me of another of my annual desert sojourns years ago. That time, I took a few days by myself to hike and camp to the oases nestled in the mountains around the Coachella Valley, hidden clefts of palms and sand from which cool water bubbles. A day after I returned, I found a heart drawn on the dusty window of my car. It had to have been Liz, my daughter, who was six years old at the time. Her drawings of hearts were as distinctive as her handwriting. They were scattered all over the house. Her production of hearts was as profligate as her love. At least some of her artwork - her "heartwork" – made it into the scrapbook. Otherwise she would have left no “hard copy” from that precious period of her life.
It is a powerful urge. Every year I feel compelled to go to the desert for a while, to refresh my familiarity with God's “hard copy”: the naked mountains glowing in the sunrise, yucca and mormonweed and mesquite in lonesome clumps scattered across the landscape. My body needs to witness the testament of the Almighty in the banded rock of the canyon walls, to taste the sacrament of the sage-scented air. I return with a dusty vehicle, and I’m ready for heartwork, refreshed and ready to engage with family and community.
Ministry is my heartwork. For years I did it with homeless and other very low-income people. They know the desperate loneliness of the asphalt wasteland that passes for so much of what we call civilization. Cast into the remotest part of our cultural desert, they are left to listen to voices howling from within, voices heard only when people are terribly alone. At the same time, there is beauty in the desert of the homeless. It has its verdant oases, places where love bubbles up. Some of the most profound acts of compassion I witnessed in those years were among homeless people who comforted and cared for each other in their toughest moments.
Now my heartwork is in church, where we gather to quench an overwhelming thirst. Even a life of relative comfort can’t mask the spiritual drought that so many of us suffer in our work and in our relationships. It is possible to be surrounded by water and still feel completely dry. So in church we paw at the sand, hoping that the living water of the spirit will bubble up.
My heartwork largely consists of listening to people share their stories. In my office, people talk until the water begins to spring. A good story opens an oasis in the desert. It brings new to life to otherwise forgettable incidents and isolated thoughts that seemed dull and dusty. Meaning, purpose, and redemption are found in events that seemed their antitheses. A story isn't necessarily good because all goes well in it, but rather because the storyteller finds much more in the story than the sum of its parts. Witnessing this ongoing discovery of this “good news”, otherwise known as the gospel, is the great privilege of my “heartwork”.
May each of us find signs of love in the dry, dusty places of our lives. May the church be communities of people who do “heartwork” together, helping each other dig down within to open up oases of joy and compassion.