Listen to your heart

There have been so many times in my live, as I realize now, that I had turned away from hearing what my heart was trying to say to me. I callously responded to the "cry of my heart" with; "that is impossible", "it can't be done". I could not hear or maybe didn't want to hear what my heart really wanted me to know at least not until I realized just how beautifully made it was. It was only then, that I had to listen to what it had to tell me...

I was in my apartment as a "single again" christian woman as I looked at the beautiful Capodimonte red rose blossom that my mom had purchased for me at a gift shop while we were at lunch some months earlier. It was sitting on a table in my apartment. As I stopped and looked at it one day, I took a moment to ponder its beauty and as if I was talking to it, I said "You are so beautiful and crafted with such detail"...I heard God's voice say  to me:

"I love you more than this rose. 

You are MORE beautiful 

and 

I have fashioned the details of your life 

with MORE care than this piece of porcelain. 

You are more precious to me 

and more beautiful 

than ALL the roses in the world".

I cried with huge tears of gratefulness for FEELING so loved that God would "use" a Capodimonte porcelain rose to tell me of "how beautiful and loved" that I really am. I had identified my SELF as a "rose" being that it was my family name, my favorite flower and that I had decorated my first "single again" apartment in a rose motif, this touched my heart deeply. I was SEEN by God and deemed beautiful; my life and heart have been carefully crafted with delicate detail by the Master's hand. I was was beautiful and worthy of love.

My mind went back to the night BEFORE my marriage to my first husband; nearly 3 years after the beginning of the "Dark Ages", the time that G and I spent away from each other. I realized that this man I was about to marry "was not G" and had "not intellectually stimulated me as G. had done". My heart collapsed into despair. Not only was I resigning myself to a life without love but also a life without intellectual stimulation and challenge. A life without G. This would become the darkest day of my life.

As I stood before my rose on that day, I could then "hear my heart"...the heart that had cried out "to be loved" and it was then that I heard my heart say

"I have been loved" 

(line from the book Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte). I knew that I HAVE been loved. I knew that G loved me and that I had BEEN loved by him. I HAD loved this man and felt his love for me and LONGED for it.

A heart that has been abused and unloved finds itself sometimes unworthy of love. Even love that it had known before. Sometimes we need to be reminded that we are all "worthy of love" and it is ONLY then that we will "hear our hearts" and pursue the love that we had known before.