So Much Held in a Heart
Brian Doyle writes that every living creature has some kind of interior motion.
Even the smallest cells, he says, have fluid “swirling and whirling.”
And then he writes: “We all churn inside. So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment.”
Indeed.
So much held in a heart.
Joy and worry.
Memory and longing.
Grief and gratitude.
Spiritual rumblings we can’t quite settle.
A whole lot can be happening inside a human heart before breakfast.
Our hearts beat something like two billion times in a lifetime. Two billion pulses. Two billion small churnings. And somewhere in all that churning, the deeper questions surface:
Can anything hold us steady?
Can love be trusted?
Can peace find its way into all this inner motion?
Easter dares to answer yes.
The resurrection of Christ is not only about life after death. It is God’s great insistence that life and love are stronger than death now. Stronger than fear. Stronger than despair. Stronger than whatever has us barricaded behind locked doors.
That’s where resurrection first showed up—not in ideal conditions, but in frightened hearts.
And that matters.
Resurrection still happens in churning hearts.
It rises when hope returns after disappointment.
When healing begins where hurt once ruled.
When something like renewal rises out of life’s unraveling.
When we become aware—sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly—
that we are held by a Love that will not let us go.
That, too, is resurrection.
Maybe that’s what Easter keeps teaching us: The heart can hold so much—and somehow, grace is spacious enough to hold it all.
We all churn.
And still—God keeps moving in us.
Much love,
Pastor Gregg
Inspired by Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song
