While I tend to try and limit my time on social media in favor of other activities, like reading or listening to a good book or, even better, working on a writing project, there are definitely times I give in to the desire to scroll somewhat mindlessly through one of the major platforms. I do, however, try to override my mindless scrolling and seek out reels of cat, dog, or bird videos for a feel-good moment, or I check out influencers who tend to provide encouraging content, content that reminds me to look for the helpers or that encourages me to feed my passions and my interests. Today, as I sat in the waiting room during my youngest teenager’s counseling appointment, I came across a small word meme that spoke to me:
Those ideas sparked something in me, in my heart, actually. But more than that, they painted a word picture in my mind of my girls—how I see them quite often and how I hope they will choose to live out their lives. In my own life, I often come back to the words in Proverbs 4:23: Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. To me, tending to the heart like a fire stirs a similar and familiar aspect of living into our giftedness and abilities. It also speaks more than a little bit to the idea of guarding the heart because tending a fire pretty much is guarding it from burning out and from losing its qualities of warmth, light, and delight.
When we first moved to North Carolina, we found a rental home with an oversized living room space that included built-in bookshelves with a fireplace between them at one end of the room, as well as a wall of windows where sunlight often streamed in during the late afternoon. It was a wonderful space for reading, movie watching, and simply being together, and I loved starting a fire in the early mornings of the winter months. I enjoyed the way that fire could take the chill out of the air and the way it would grow to create a warmth that permeated the entire oversized living area as it burned throughout the morning hours. Part of its ongoing warming power flowed directly from my care, from my tending of that fire so it didn’t burn out; I carefully stoked it, fed it new logs, and arranged the dwindling burning pieces as the fire burned so the flames remained consistent and therefore so did the fire’s usefulness in keeping that space warm.
Our hearts require similar consistent care, and I have long appreciated the privilege and opportunity to tend to the hearts of our two teenagers, especially as they continue to learn this art of tending to their hearts in their own ways and according to what their hearts require from them. Of course all of us fall short sometimes in the ways of caring for and nourishing our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies, but I believe teenagers struggle with this even more because they are still learning how to do this well. They are still learning what they need in order to stoke the fires of their lives. They are at times a bit more tentative; they are at other times a bit more aggressive in the care of themselves.
In other words, they are still learning the ways of self care or, more importantly, the care of the self—the ways of kindness directed at themselves, the ways of patience with themselves and their shortcomings, and the ways of gentleness and grace toward themselves for mistakes made along the way. As their mama, I love that they are open to my words, guiding them to see themselves as the masterpieces of the Creator, the masterpieces they are even if they do not necessarily accept themselves that way just yet. Even more, I am grateful for the opportunity and daily reminder to model this acceptance and nurture of the heart and the self, because I do not always treat myself with the tenderness or kindness God intends of me either. We are, all of us, always learning and as I tend the hearts of these two remarkable young women, I am also tending to mine. And as I do, as they do, I am getting to witness the various ways their hearts light up this life we share together.