There once was a man who was obviously once a boy. This boy was not like other boys, but there were other boys like him. At least on the outside. On the inside he knew he was different, strange, weird, even a bit creepy. He knew he was different but not in the ways everyone else thought he was different. His heart was what was different.
His heart was one that broke easily, healed quickly and loved deeply. But that was only one side of his heart. The other side was cold. Dark. Filled with malice, greed and hate.
The soft side was easy to see. It made him appear weak and awkward. Because of this he was often the target of torment from other boys. Girls his age looked at him in disgust and wrinkled their noses at him. He was too weird and acted like a girl. He didn’t like sports or cars like the other boys did. He would much rather stay home and read a book or “play house” with his cousin or the one neighbor girl that actually called him friend.
The other side, the hard side, hated literally everyone. It hated the neighborhood bully, it hated his family. It hated being forced to go to church. It was full of dark thoughts and unspeakable evil desires. It wanted to exact revenge on every single person that had ever insulted or hurt the boy.
His softer side hated only one thing and that was the other side. He hated that dark, cold part of his heart but not in the same way that the other side hated things. He wanted to change that part of his heart. He wanted to soften it and fill it with love.
You see, this hard side was not always so. When he was very young that side of his heart was just as tender as the rest of it.
On his first day of kindergarten he made friends with another boy in his class. The bond was almost immediate. He did not understand what it was that he felt for this boy at that age. Things were fine until about second grade when other boys began to notice their particular closeness. They began calling him all sorts of derogatory names and at times they were even physically abusive.
He would take this hurt home with him and hide away in his room and just cry. Frequently he would cry so hard that the small capillary vessels in his face would turn bright red and his eyes would be puffy and swollen.
The next day, he would pull himself together, put on a radiant smile and boldly walk to the bus stop, board the bus and once at the school, march happily into the classroom. He had his one friend and that was enough to make him happy.
The years passed and the time came when he had to move to a different school. This was in the days before the internet and cell phones so even though he lived just a few miles away from his friend, he never saw him again. His heart literally broke. His only neighbor friend had moved away as well. He had no one. He felt completely alone.
This hurt and loneliness went on into his teenage years. Over this time he began to understand more and more about how he was different. He would look at the girls his age and would be filled with intense jealousy. They had literally everything he wanted and they were everything he wanted to be.
He slowly and cautiously began to explore this part of himself but when his secret slipped out, the rebuttal and punishment was swift and intense. The humiliation was so egregious that he literally wanted to end his life.
But the softer side of him protected him. “For now,” it said, “let’s take this pain and pack it into this very small corner. It can stay there for a while and we can just ignore it.”
As he grew into adulthood he would take every hurt and pack it into that corner. It wasn’t a corner any longer. It was now a large chunk of his heart and there was so much packed in there that it had solidified and became as hard and cold as granite.
It began to crowd out the softer side and was slowly draining the very life out of it. His life became meaningless. Just going through the motions like the boom of an oil pump over a well that had long gone dry. Up, then down, up, and down again. With a purpose that no longer mattered.
The heart is much like a field. Some are lush and green. Some are stony and barren. Sometimes the one is close to the other. This was the case with his heart. That soft, fertile side desperately wanted to live but given its proximity to the stony ground, the only thing that would grow was briar bushes.
One day a beautiful bird, carrying a small seed in her beak, was flying over, looking for a place to land and rest her wings. She saw the bright berries on the briar bush and began to descend.
The softer side of the heart wanted to scream out a warning to the bird “don’t land there! It will destroy you!” But it was so incredibly lonely and the bird was so beautiful that she stayed silent.
“Maybe the bird will want to stay,” she thought. “Maybe the thorns will not snare her and she will only see the beauty and not the danger.”
The beautiful bird landed among the thorns but she didn’t notice the danger. She stayed for a while and the softer side of the heart was overjoyed. She finally had something of beauty in her life. She was selfish, she knew but sometimes loneliness clouds better judgment.
The beautiful bird and the soft heart formed a bond, love even, but the heart never could bring herself to tell her beautiful bird about the dangerous thorns. The weight of the secret became so heavy that she could bear it no longer and she confessed to the bird the danger she was in.
The bird was angry at the deceit and rightly so. She flapped her wings vigorously. The thorns tried desperately to hold her down and bloodied her while she fought to escape. After a struggle she did escape and flew high and far away leaving the heart once again alone.
The hardened heart tried to justify his actions and accused the softer side of sabotage. He swore that he would take over the entire field of the heart and leave nothing at all of the softer side.
The softer side sat grieving. Defeated, until she noticed the small seed that the beautiful bird had left behind. Gently she scooped it up and carried it as far from the stony ground as she could. She dug deep into the soft soil that remained. She sat beside it and watered it daily with her tears and spoke lovingly to it.
“I will protect you. I will nurture you. I will defend you and I will love you.”
She has faith that this seed will grow. It will spread its roots and branches. It will break up the stony and fallow ground. Love will again fill the entire heart and make it soft again.
If you go forth with love sowing precious seed you will reap a bountiful harvest of love in return.
Love conquers all.