See With Your Heart And Become What Your Heart Knows

See With Your Heart
and become what your heart knows.
Quiet your mind.
Turn to Truth… to God.
Listen to what you hear when you become still.

 

This little girl is more than a painting. I have painted her so many times, in so many poses, and on so many different things, that she has become part of my heart.

A part that started a long time ago. She is not one girl, she is many. She is the face of a long list of little girls I met when I volunteered at Hogan Hozhoni: Girls abandoned, left behind, forgotten… little girls whose lives were unpredictable from one day to the next.

 

 

Hogan Hozhoni,

Navajo words that mean House Of Peace, was a home away from home that was always there for them. Police officers and social workers brought children to this big, ugly block of a house that was dreary-looking on the outside, but inside was filled with peace.  Filled with heart.

The girls, and boys, came
dirty,
unkempt,
hair crawling with lice,
occasionally clutching a baby bottle filled with watered down alcohol,

to be received into loving arms; arms that wrapped around all of what they were and took them into a place where the heart spoke.

As a volunteer worker, you go into the door of Hogan Hozhoni to physically care for children in need, but you come back out seeing with the heart.  There is no other way to cope, when one wants to fight the injustice but doesn’t know where the beginning is; when the outer shells of the children are despicable, but the little hearts beating beneath the grime are reaching, hungry.

I wonder how many of those now grownup sweet littles we cared for at the volunteer unit “see with their heart” today. I wonder how many feel as if their lives fulfil their own native proverb…

 

 

Life seemed incredibly unfair to them. We never wanted to let them go when it was time to be reunited with relatives. Some we knew would be back with us in a few weeks. Then we’d start the process of bonding with them again. We saw their lives as unbearably traumatic.

What do their hearts know? Do they want to listen to the wind… the silence… in their today lives?

Jesus said,

”
And I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another Comforter,
that he may abide with you for ever;

Even the Spirit of truth;
whom the world cannot receive,
because it seeth him not,
neither knoweth him:
but ye know him;
for he dwelleth with you,
and shall be in you.

I will not leave you comfortless:
I will come to you.
”
John 14:16-18

 

And in another place:

”
Be still
and know
that I am God.
“

 

 

Today I’m praying for “Fatherless” children everywhere,

young, old, orphans or with earthly parents,

who listen to the wind… listen to their hearts…

And I pray they find the Comforter in their hearts.

I pray

they see Jesus with their hearts.