I cannot tell this story in any way that truly conveys… I have been trying, and I can’t find the words. So I’ll say what comes, and it will be what it is.

Almost a week ago, last Tuesday evening, my heart was full to bursting, and broken to bits. Jesus didn’t have to die. He came to live love, and because we were hell bent on proving that we were powerful enough to be perfect without His love, we killed Him.

It’s hard to understand what that feels like, if His love hasn’t literally saved your life, and driven you to show others that He would do anything to save theirs too. If we let Him. It is hard to explain what it feels like to visualize both the beauty of hearts and their depths of pain, to carry the beauty of one’s own heart and its depth of pain, while continuously trying to inadequately communicate the message that all our healing is in love, where we are perfectly seen.

So my heart was full to bursting, and broken to bits, as I saw mountains of pain overshadowing the beauty. And I felt helpless. Helpless and angry and tired because we refuse to see how easy it would be to be better together, with Love. And I vowed never to set foot in church again. Because church is a world of hurt still labouring incessantly to prove its ability to be perfect without love.

And in the midst of that pain a message came through, “Peggy is going to call you. Answer the phone.” It was good that it was a message, and good that I was being obedient to my Father who told me not to talk to anyone unless I talked with Him first. Because my immediate response would have been, “Fuck off, CHURCH!”

And thankfully, Peggy did not call. She sent a message. She is a beautiful soul, and I was not in a beautiful space. I stared at it, and only because of years of being taught to do the right thing, along with my Father’s Friend pressing me to respond in the affirmative was I able to propose that I could follow through with a call in forty-five minutes (when I might be better able to breathe and be polite). She offered to gift us tickets to Imagine Van Gogh for that coming Saturday afternoon. There is a story; the tickets had been on a long journey to us, and here we were.

And so came Saturday morning where habit was trying to press me to be in church, and Spirit said no. I had been through a gruelling heartbreaking week, and my Father needed me to take time to heal. He showed me the wound, and carried me through a beautiful hour of infant healing, built of every moment of His nurturing essence in me combined with the light of His essence in others, Bradshaw, Loyst, Lewis et al. Stage 7 of many.

We carried on to Van Gogh. Lunch in Vancouver under a tree, with enough warmth to be comfortable and enough breeze to soothe our souls. We arrived at the Convention Centre early, with time for the needed bathroom break, and enough time left to be as lost as we might be while we found our place.

We went through the motions, received directions, and then stepped into Van Gogh’s world. Using snippets of his story, written, framed, and suspended in air he was introduced, and then we moved through to the space where we could share a little bit of his heart as expressed on canvas. And there I was, in church, in connection with Van Gogh who could also visualize the beauty of life and its depths of pain. My eyes met his, and I cried, as I think he might have cried. And there I would have stayed for many more hours if my knee and event policy would have allowed.

This week, I don’t know if I can make it into the building, where people smile and pretend that all is well while burying depths of pain, and fear being real, because we have allowed pride and hollow ambitions to overshadow the beauty of being guided by the honesty of connection and the simplicity of compassion, in Love. We’ll see.