The Nutcracker

Merry Christmas-Eve! I must be getting older because I feel less and less excited and nervous today than I've felt in previous years, even as a teenager. However, I am starting to grasp just how amazing it is that God became one of us, died for my cruddiness, and rose again to prove His divinity. The grace that I experience from God amazes me daily.

I've been listening to Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Ballet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the better part of the day. Tchaikovsky is one of my favorite composers because he satisfies almost everything I look for in music: exciting rhythms, beautiful melodic lines, a variety of moods and tempos, a certain level of unpredictability, a diversity of instrumentation, and creative inspiration. The music speaks to a wide spectrum of emotions, leaving out only a few. Tchaikovsky stimulates my intellect, feelings, spirit, and creativity.

I love how he seems to value closure and resolution so much. Like Beethoven, we works hard to create suspense and tension, forcing the listener to greatly anticipate the resolution. When it comes, it is wonderfully satisfying. Even if the resolution is a minor chord, nothing is left open. I pray that I will experience the kind of closure in my life that I experience in this music. That would be fabulous. It would set my heart to rest.

About the title

A good friend and mentor of mine recommended that I read Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home by Richard Foster. Here's a quote from the introductory chapter: "Coming Home."

Loving is the syntax of prayer. To be effective pray-ers, we need to be effective lovers. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Coleridge declares, "He prayeth well, who loveth well." Coleridge, of course, got this idea from the Bible, for its pages breathe the language of divine love. Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love. This is why the great literature on prayer is frankly and wonderfully erotic. "The Trinity," writes Juliana of Norwich, "is our everlasting lover." "O my love!" exclaims Richard Rolle. "O my Honey! O my Harp! O my psalter and canticle all the day! When will you heal my grief? O root of my heart, when will you come to me?" "Jesus, Lover of my soul," pleads Charles Wesley. "Let me to thy bosom fly."

"O root of my heart." This is the first time I have heard God called the "root of my heart." I absolutely love this metaphor. I mean, look at what roots do for trees. First of all, there is no tree without a root. The roots must come first. Roots give a tree life by soaking up the water and nutrients in the ground. Often, the roots of a tree are quite larger than the tree itself. When the roots run out of room to grow, the tree does not remain healthy. Roots also keep a tree grounded in the face of extreme conditions. They make it very difficult to dig up the tree even when a great amount of effort is spent.

The parallels between the root of a tree and the root of a heart are obvious. God is my creator, my sustainer, the one who keeps me grounded in Him and His Word (John 1), and is my greatest, most important feature. He is at the bottom of my inner, most vital part: my heart. Even if the tree on which I bear fruit is withered or cut down, my root will still exist.

Lord, thank you for being the root of my heart. Help me to love you, to focus on you and to draw strength from both your Living Water and your nutritious Word. Amen.

Format and theme

Welcome to my new blog, root of my heart. I have read various online blogs for a few years now and have discovered that there are many options as to the material I could put in a weblog:

1. The Junkyard. This type is entirely personal. I would simply talk about my daily or weekly activities and any other random thoughts. In some ways, this would be an outlet for all of the junk my brain can't deal with on the inside. Some of it would be stream of consciousness babbling, but most would be negative and almost always centered on me.
2. The Academic Journal. This is the opposite of The Junkyard. Here, I would probably do research and write essays on various aspects of life. I would make philosophical arguments here based purely on logic and evidence and challenge my friends to a duel of rhetoric. This kind could be fun, however entirely impersonal.
   
3. The Themed-Blog. This kind of journal contains some personal and some academic prowess, but the topics would be centered around a theme or idea.

My weblog is of this third kind. A few weeks ago God convinced me to start this blog when I had the time and attention span. Thank God, now I have both.

Recently, I've discovered that I tend to live in two basic states. Either I live in my heart or out of it.

When I live in my heart, I feel alive in Christ and my heart is soft. In this state I care about and experience God, the world, relationships, growth, love, deep thought, and the Fruits of the Spirit. I am moved to live in my heart by my parents, my close friends, musical worship times, and significant absences of degrading sin to which I am addicted.

When I live out of my heart, I tend to be fairly numb and the colors of my reality fade to shades of black. In this state, my heart is hard and does not experience or care for the above mentioned items. The things which draw me out of my heart tend to be computer games, an unbalanced schedule (too busy or too idle), distraction, laziness, selfishness, and various addictive sins of the flesh. Playing computer games and indulging sins of the flesh are active choices that I make to avoid living in my heart. I will definitely get to that later, I promise.

I intend to keep with my theme of living in my heart in every post on this journal, if possible. When I get these thoughts and words outside of me, they affect me. They hold me accountable. This is due to the mixture of a personal and academic format. On one hand, I will read my Bible and other books about the heart and be inspired to write about their philosophies, but on the other hand I will share some of my struggles and apply these philosophies to my personal experience. I hope to avoid becoming an "emotional exhibitionist," meaning someone with a compulsive desire to expose deep feelings indiscriminately (thanks Mom). This might be hard for me.

This weblog is not just for God and I - it's also for you. I hope that my posts aren't too long or wordy for you to be encouraged by my thoughts and my story. I would love to hear your ideas, experiences, encouragement, or constuctive criticism. I am a verbal processor, so this would be especially meaningful to me.

If I am living in my heart, you will see regular postings here. I have not often been living in my heart recently and I have a problem with discipline. Pray that I will get the time and wholeness necessary to write. Again, welcome.