With All Your Heart
Her name was Shannon. From the time that I first became her pastor and until now, I have found her to engage life with all her heart. She was among the nine high-school students I took on their first trip to Haiti in July of 2009, and she repeatedly returned. Haiti in July is hot, especially in Jacmel. The heat serves to add to the disorientation privileged young people experience when immersed in a setting of shocking poverty and primitive infrastructure.
In the late afternoon of a long sweltering day, we were making our way back to our guest house and trudging along a dusty unimproved road of stones and sharp rocks. The sun was beating down on us and the group was physically and emotionally exhausted. As we walked a young boy wearing just a dirty oversized T-shirt came up beside us and said, “Mwen pa gen soulye.” I have no shoes. “Èske ou ka ban mwen soulye?” Can you give me shoes? As I translated the boy’s words to the group, they had this telling look of helplessness. You could fry an egg on the stones in the road, and nobody was carrying around an extra pair of shoes.
We walked on feeling sad, guilty, indicted, and all the conundrum of feelings when you encounter such a terrible gap between what we have and the impoverished children of Haiti. We reached the guest house, entered the gate, and immediately went for water. I looked around, counted heads as I compulsively do on these trips, and discovered that Shannon was missing. I hollered for her, and nobody could say that they had seen her. I ran up to the roof to a place where we frequently gathered, and she was not there. I began to panic at the thought of a young teenage American girl on her own in a strange place. As I was imagining worst case scenarios, the guest house security guard opened the big iron gate. In walked Shannon. She was barefoot. She had given the boy her shoes and unbeknownst to us navigated up the scorching, rocky road to the guest house in her bare feet. Whenever I hear the words, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,” and with it to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” I think of Shannon and her shoes.
Mary and Her Heart
In the first chapter of Luke (1:26-38), the angel Gabriel comes to visit a young, “lowly” (her words) teenage girl (14 years-old and maybe with no shoes) in a small unremarkable town called Nazareth. The news he gives her is astonishing. She will conceive a son not by lying with a man but by the power of the Holy Spirit. He will be called Jesus, Son of God. It will happen because “nothing will be impossible for God.” At the end of this conversation, Mary comes to the only response she knew to give, a response that was all heart. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.” As the late Rachel Held Evans reminds us, years before Mary’s precious son, Jesus, would gather his disciples on the night in which he was betrayed, Mary herself would say to her God, “This is my body given for you.” It’s a matter of the heart.
This is Our Story
As we draw near to celebrate Christmas in this troubled, confused, and often dangerous world, we should remain aware that this long ago encounter of the angel Gabriel with Mary is our story too. That’s why we tell it! It is our story because the coming of Jesus is not just the birth of a baby; it is the manifestation of a decision. No matter who we are or what we might face, God has decided to incarnate among us – in, under, and with us – in solidarity with us and take on our stories and our lives as God’s own. And the real presence of God among us in Jesus the Christ is a God of whom it could be argued is all heart – showing us what it means to love the unlovable, forgive the unforgiveable, embrace those whom the world declares to be “other,” and on the cross give everything withholding nothing … for you.
Jesus says to those who are confused by his unrelenting love for all people, “I am the light of the world” (see John 8). He also says to us, “You are the light of the world” (see Matthew 5). As the lyrics of my favorite Christmas carol goes, “Light and life to ALL he brings,” we manifest the light of Christ when we engage the world with “all our heart.”
In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,
