Make Room for Hope

My heart started out like yours.......
     an unconquered wilderness.

It was intended to be a Spirit house - to be like Eden, "the planting of the Lord," a "well watered garden" full of delights, orderly, colorfully and logically planned, planted without chaotic over growths of weeds and intruding vines.
 Our hearts have such capacity to become holding tanks of beauty that can exude and pour out over our world to transform the hopelessness into something positive and rock-solid to hold on to. All we have to do is decide whether or not we'll allow it. 

It is time for hope!  

It is time to clean out the heart tank - exchange what's in there for what can be in there.
Exchange is such an exercise of freedom. The more we are willing to exercise exchanging "our stuff" for "God's stuff" the more our heart's capacity will enlarge for things that we could never imagine. 

1 Corinthians 2:9 "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him." (KJV)

I'd like to quote Michael Card's "The Things We Leave Behind"
    "People left things behind after they encountered Jesus; the woman at the well left her      water jars, the son of the widow of Nain left his coffin, Simon and the other fishermen left their boats and nets; 
I wonder what I have left behind for His sake?
With each thing left behind, we leave a small piece of ourselves, because a possession 
isn't a little something you own, as much as something that owns a little bit of you.
We leave behind a part of our old self, our old man. (our old habits, old ways of reacting, old
beliefs that we mold the rest of ourselves around....slipping back into our old same-old-
same-old...  my thoughts) 

     In return for whatever small thing we discard Jesus gives us a part of Himself in 
     exchange.

    With Him is great freedom from those things we leave behind, freedom from that greatest
    self-possessing possession, our "self."

Why am I holding onto sooooo much? 

Fear of losing out.

You know, children trust with such abandonment because they have no concept of losing out. They open their little hands and hearts. Their little hearts, I believe, are so much bigger than ours as adults! If we could really see their hearts the way Father God does, it would look like they had an ocean of trust inside of them. How could that be possible?

Thomas Williams composed the hymn, "O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus." It's rolling lyrics say of His love:
     .....vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
    Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me...

Now that is the kind of bountiful heart-filling, heart-healing, heart-freeing exchange that can wash out hopelessness and flood instead with resolve toward a positive outlook.