The Curse of the Wandering Heart

Have you ever heard of the curse of the Wandering Heart?

Here, gather in closer and let me tell you:

One morning, we wake up and look around us. The world all seems normal... But it doesn't feel normal. For years we have lived our lives peacefully, happily even, in this normal world we know and so, this feeling of otherness comes as quite the surprise. Something is off, and our hearts can feel that.

Now there are two responses to this pull at our heartstrings. The easy response is to ignore it and continue living our lives as we have been, happy and peaceful. It's a life we know well and can easily traverse it. But I tell you, that feeling of otherness will never go away.

The other response, the more dangerous and mysterious one, is to feel the tug on our hearts and let ourselves be pulled to where it desires to go.

And so, as the valiant few, we put one foot in front of the other, wandering to where our hearts pull us.

We look and see and experience and feel the newness of life around us. We explore and dive into the worlds of newness we encounter and, as we do so, we realize something profound in our hearts--our hearts are growing, their depths to an unknown and unmeasurable distance. The new places and people we meet and know carve out their places in our hearts. As our hearts expand and grow and stretch, oftentimes painfully, we realize that our hearts know no bounds. For even as it hurts to fit in all that we come to cherish, we see that there is a space in and around our hearts that can never be filled.

We begin to realize that the world is too big for our hearts, and yet, it is not big enough.

We realize that our hearts deeply crave something otherworldly. Something in this world, yes, but not of it. Something that whispers lovingly to our hearts, calling out to us to seek the eternal source of that whisper.

And so we wander far and wide in a never-ending search for that which will Fill our Hearts.

And that, my dear, is the curse of the Wandering Heart.