My Year of Hearts

Every year, I ask the Lord for a word of the year, and this year the Lord put very clearly on my heart: it would be my year of "hearts."

In those final December days while in prayer, I wrote in my notes app, “This will be the year of a great, deep, colorful heart-type love. This year, I will love with the love I keep in reserves. I will love in full and in return, know close, responsive, and intimate love. This will be my year of free, understanding love—the love that my heart beats for.”

While my year of hearts started with me just wearing a lot of fun heart-shaped earrings, I could not have imagined the reawakening of my heart which has unfolded over these last several months. The Lord continues to expose all the ways in which I deeply crave to love and be loved. The Lord has used this year to shatter my facade of self-sufficiency, and un-numb me to all the ways I accept fractured, counterfeit love as normal. In those needy places, at the core of my being, I have met the tender love of Jesus in a new way.

Today is the feast day of Saint Therese of Lisieux, someone with a concrete understanding of how our hearts burn for intimate love and how the Lord desires to fulfill it completely. In a letter to her cousin, she wrote, “But on whom shall our poor heart lavish its love? Who shall be found that is great enough to be the recipient of its treasures? Will a human being know how to comprehend them, and above all will he be able to repay? There exists but one Being capable of comprehending love; it is Jesus; He alone can give us back infinitely more than we shall ever give to him” (source).

Saint Therese, we ask for your intercession that we would become women who entirely trust Jesus with our infinite desire for love.

Trust Jesus with our infinite desire for love. // @sarahericksonnClick to tweet

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