holy spirit

The Cleft of His Heart

/ Morgan Grace Hart / Leave a comment

(Image courtesy of Jim Berry, www.cayman365.com)

In my mind’s eye, while I was praying, I saw myself coming up to Jesus on the cross, seeing Him bleeding and hurting, so indescribably torn up. I started to cry, and reached up to touch His injured feet with my hands. He smiled at me, as best He could with His face so beaten, and His voice was filled with affection for me. “If my hands were free to do so,” He told me, “I’d hug you right now.” I cried and cried, and finally said to Him, “Jesus, I care about You. It’s so painful to see You so…broken.” “Yes,” He said, “but the breaks are where you get in. They’re openings. Just like the cleft in the rock where you are held safe, so the fissures of my Heart are carved out for you, a place for you to be hidden.” [This was also in answer to some prayertime I had had with Him recently, about what to do if you really need a safe place to go for rest, but aren’t physically able to leave where you are.] He continued, “as an infant is safe inside its mother’s womb, so you can rest safe inside of Me.”

I kept imagining it, as my kind of peace-image: being at total peace in my Lord Christ, in the depths of His heart, in stasis in the warmth and nourishment of His Blood.

God bless you,

Morgan Grace Hart

Exodus 33:18-23; John 6:53-59; Romans 6:11

Blue Spirit Water

/ Morgan Grace Hart / Leave a comment

Something lately has me going back in my mind to a vision of sorts I had once. It’s a little hard to describe since, like a dream, it didn’t match the constraints of ordinary senses. It had that quality where two things could coexist in one place yet visually make sense, even though you could never paint an image like that in real life.

I had recently had my first child and was sitting with him on the couch. Out of nowhere, God told me something to the effect of, “Here. Now. I want you to have an encounter with the Holy Spirit.”

“Here?” I asked. He said yes.

“Now?” I asked. He said yes.

“Okay, then,” I said.

And suddenly I had this sense that He reached into me and pulled out something like chains, which He broke, and as soon as He did this, my soul became buoyant like a diver removing weight, and rose above me. He met me in the air, His soul to mine, and embraced me while turning in a matter reminiscent of a high school slow dance. Something like clean water came from His chest in a torrent, entering mine and sweeping out, in its force, dirty water, which flowed back into Him. I had not recognized or looked for features on Him – the experience was only partly visual – but now He was definitely Jesus, and I saw the dirty water running slowly from the wounds in His side and hands. I had the thought that this probably came with some degree of pain for Him. (If there was something after that, I no longer remember, but I do remember afterwards holding my child and having the sense that we were both surrounded and protected by the Holy Spirit.)

Not all visions are about something specific or urgent in life, and this one was never tied to any specific event.
But the memory of it is recurring, and I sometimes find links to it in my prayers. I used to see a pattern when I prayed of two curving, interlinking geometrical shapes, one blue and one brown. I realized one day that the pattern was a reference to the aforementioned vision, where the brown water was removed from me by the Blue Waters of His Spirit.

Thinking on this topic, in the scriptural reference below, I reference some of the more dream-like and/or spatially confusing visions in the Bible, as food for thought. PLEASE take time to look over a few of these – they’re very interesting.

Ezekiel 1:4-9, 1:15-28, 2:1-2, 3:12-15; Acts 11:4-9; Isaiah 6:1-2; revelations 4:1-3 and 4:6.

Spiritual Diabetes

/ Morgan Grace Hart / Leave a comment

Dear Friends,

Lately I have been guilty of the terrible crime of wasting my time here on Earth. It’s not something I set out to do; it’s not even something I was fully aware that I was doing. But lately I’ve gotten sucked into so many pointless arguments, especially on the Internet. Somewhere in my pride I thought, “I’m a good writer, I can use my good writing to change these people,” so I got into it with several strangers I found disparaging the faith on news sites or YouTube channels I subscribe to. And how I got into it! Whole books’ worth of text written, hours spent at this. And do you know what I found? No one can win an argument with someone who truly does not believe them. It’s just like chasing a rat through a maze. If your superior reasoning leads their falsehoods into a dead end, they will turn around and shoot down another tunnel. And when they get to the end of that, they will again do an about-face and find a new tunnel to run through. In this way, these conversations can be endless, simply re-orienting every time you start to close in. I finally had to leave some discussions and block the people involved. I seethed over their burning and baseless hate, their inaccurate statistics, their across-the-board assumptions that all Christians were evil and ignorant. It was then that it hit me: I was not having an argument with other human beings. I was having an argument with Satan. Every time I rebuked one lie, he had another one waiting, and by slowly baiting me in this fashion, he was getting me to wander further and further away from home. That’s all he was doing. It didn’t matter so much who “won” the argument (if that is even possible). It mattered that, in all the time I was “fighting” for God, I was not looking at God. I was not born again through Christ’s redeeming blood to spend time attempting to out-argue people. I was brought here to love.

I realized the depth of my error when I began looking at it in the Bible. I had not first considered Jesus’ words:
“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:6). Definitely, I had been combatting something that had a lot more interest in tearing me apart than it did in hearing what I had to say.

My shame grew worse as I continued reading scriptures:
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:15). Had I judged these people? Had I made assumptions about them before first checking myself? Yes. Yes I had.

But the ultimate blow came from this verse, which I next saw in my scripture study:
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” (1 Corinthians 13:1). How utterly humbling for a writer to read these words. I could write the prettiest words on Earth, and if they’re not soaked in the love of God’s glory, they don’t sound any better than a lot of crashing and thumping sounds.

In this same vein, the Lord recently brought to mind a memory from many years ago. I was working quietly one day when a coworker – normally a very nice man – started speaking very rudely to me. I was offended and left. Shortly thereafter, however, I saw the same coworker slumped over at a table, arguing rudely but weakly at a friend trying to get him to drink a coke. It didn’t take long for me to learn the details and put it all together in my head: He was diabetic. When his blood sugar dropped dangerously low, his personality went down with it. While normally I get easily offended and take a very long time to forgive people, it wasn’t difficult to forgive that one coworker. After all, he was sick. It wasn’t him talking, it was the illness – the drop in blood sugar. After that, I watched very carefully for any signs of rudeness from this coworker, knowing that if it happened, it was not a slight to me so much as a sign that I would need to intervene on his behalf.

When I thought over the aging memory, the Lord led me to think about something: If I could so easily forgive this man for being sick, and ignore him without internalizing his insults, why then am I so offended by the words of people whose hearts are sick? Don’t I think it might be their illness speaking for them?

God bless y’all, and have a good weekend.

Sincerely,
Morgan Hart

Scripture verses:
Mark 2:17, John 8:43-45

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