Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.
Proverbs 4:23 (NIV)
The Sentence You Take Home
Anita walks home from work in the dark with a sentence somebody said to her at four o’clock, and she has answered it more ways than she’ll ever say. Three blocks, the same three blocks every night, past the house with the dog behind the screen door. At her own door she checks the deadbolt twice, the way she has since she was twenty-two.
A father is talking to his son across a table. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart. He gives the son a method along with the order, and the method is the words he taught him, kept inside the heart, where the father puts them.
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. A heart works on what it takes in and sends the material back out, sometimes weeks later, in a tone she didn’t choose.
Most of what got into Anita today arrived without knocking. She didn’t pick the remark at four o’clock, the number on the screen, or the change in a voice when she walked up. She does get the going over of it, the three blocks, the fourth answer to a sentence that is never getting a reply. That’s where the watch is kept, and it’s duller work than it sounds. The father ranks the heart above the deadbolt she remembers every night without being told.
Other things got in today without knocking too. At the store they eat in the back at two, whoever is on, and her manager brought in a pan of something the way she does most Fridays; four of them stood around it with paper plates arguing about a show none of them watch the same way. Twenty minutes, nothing happening in it, and Anita has not gone over a second of it since.
Of everything that got in today, she can put the replay down. What would it take to do that before the light goes off?
A Prayer to Remember
God, there’s a sentence from this afternoon stuck in me, and I’ve answered it four times since, and you’ve heard every version. Take it off me before I sleep, or let me be sick of it by morning. I’d rather bring it to you than run one more lap with it, and I’m not sure yet that I mean that.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
