A Full Heart

Whimsical Love Day 5

You know the Lord loves us when He makes your heart bigger through a friend's new heart. 

One of my best friend's family recently adopted a precious little girl named Brooke from China. She was abandoned by her parents, probably because they knew they could not afford to pay for her heart problems. But boy did her Father have some incredible plans for her! Her family adopted her knowing the Lord was going to use this little girl in some awesome ways. She was born with 2 chambers in her heart instead of 4. This is a pretty rare condition and is extremely hard to operate on. They basically had to take an artery and make it dump the blood directly into her lungs so her heart would not have to pump it to the lungs. The love her family has showed to her has encouraged me so much and has made me love the Lord even more by seeing this process. She recovered from the hard and long surgery very well and is doing great! I got to meet her for the first time this weekend and I have never seen a little kid so full of life and personality! 

One of my favorite parts is that her loving family always tells her she is brave and that she has a beautiful new and brave heart! What a beautiful scar to remind her of how much the Lord loves her and the new heart He has given her. 


This weekend when I got to meet her, my friend had to leave early so I stayed to play with this one and her sister. Brooke began coloring on my arm as she was playing doctor. She pretended to give me a shot with her crayon and then said, "there, now you have a bigger heart". HEART MELTS* I loved how she incorporated that in her imagination and play time. She knows she is blessed and knows she has a beautiful new heart. As she was playing, she put some foam stickers on my shoulder (her baby stickers were at school on my shoulder) and throughout the day stickers came out of the middle of nowhere haha! I loved it though, such a funny reminder of what I had seen that day! She without a doubt has one of the most joyful and loving hearts I have ever seen. 

"A cheerful heart is good medicine." Proverbs 17:22

I began thinking about why we use the symbol of a heart to represent love. Proverbs 4:23 says that the heart is the wellspring of life. Think about that for a second. The heart is what brings life. Without a heart beating, there is no life. Can you imagine a life that does not love? To me, love is life. Because of Jesus' love we are given life. Can we then in return have a life that is void of love? If life is void of love, can it truly be life? Those who love others are the ones that truly experience life. This little girl is a beautiful example of the way Jesus loves us. 

"I'm not that great at spelling and thankfully my phone auto corrects the words I type for me. What I've noticed, though, is that almost every time I type in the word love, it gets changed to the word live...I learned that fully loving and fully living are not only synonymous but the kind of life that Jesus invited us to be part of. And because of that, our lives don't need to be puffs of blue smoke anymore" (Goff, 16). Love Does

Abandoned but Loved

Whimsical Love Day 4

I think it's so cool how the Lord loves us all in different whimsical ways. One of my love languages is animals, and my King knows exactly how to love me through that. Ever since I can remember, I have basically lived in a zoo, and have even volunteered at one. There was one time in my life when I had 13 animals. Yes, you read that right. 13. There were dogs, cats, a guinea pig, hedgehog, a frog and snail, and who knows what else. I have loved every minute of my zoo life. Today I have 3 dogs, a cat, and 3 sugar gliders. There's just something about animals that speak love to me. 

Today I want to highlight one of my all time favorite animals I have ever had. I would say I am normally more of a dog person, but when it comes to this guy, he has my heart. Meet the one and only D.W. (Yes, he is a male, and yes, he is named after Arthur's SISTER. God bless his heart. You never know what you are going to get when you are a kitten in the hands of a 3rd grader). I remember going to a friend's house a few doors down when I was little and saw them playing with a loving and sweet kitten. They didn't have a kitten when I was there 30 minutes earlier.




WHERE DID THAT CUTE CHUNK OF AWESOMENESS COME FROM? They told me that someone had driven behind there house on a dirt road in a truck and threw him out the window. You would never have known just by seeing him. He was loving on us and playing with us as if he was deeply loved. He was abandoned, yet he loved. That is unconditional love. Let's just say it went a little like this.... they could not keep him so I thought that I may be able to ask around and find him a home. So, I carried him home, rang the doorbell, and when my mom answered, talked a mile a minute about how he was abandoned and needed a place to stay for the night so I could find him a home. SUCKER!!! That's irresistible. If my kid ever does that, pretty sure my heart will melt and it will be a yes every time, it's a weakness. Obviously my whole family fell in love with this little kitty that night and the rest is history. You see, he's not your average cat. This kid follows me around EVERYWHERE and is the most snugly and social little thing. He's also too smart...we have to lock all the doors because he can open them. You have got to be kidding me. He is one of the most loving animals I have ever had.

I love Job 39 because it talks about the Lord's wisdom in creating animals. You know he had to have enjoyed creating all those creatures and not only creating them, but using them in our lives to love us in a whimsical way.

I have never understood when people are not animal people. There are so many ways we can learn about God through these animals. I can see God's faithfulness through the faithful, his unconditional love through those who know no hatred, His comfort through the way they love on you and comfort you when they can tell you are down, His humility, playfulness, and beauty. There's a way that animals can minister to people that humans can not. There's a reason they are used in counseling. They just have a gift of knowing how to minister to people. I truly believe the Lord uses animals in incredible ways to minister to them. We can't control what they are thinking, we can't make them understand the baby words we use, but God can use them to minister to us without words. One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books, Love Does says,

 "But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright." 

God's love is often acted out through the things around us. He uses animals in my life to act out that love. Animals can't talk and tell us they love us, they simply act it out every day. This kind of love challenges me to act out my love for the people around me. It's too easy to simply say " I love you" but if you truly love people, it will be like a sign language. If that's not whimsical, I don't know what is.