A few weeks ago, I was reading a guided meditation by Mother Theresa called I THIRST–all about how what Jesus is thirsting for on the cross is YOU, and a deeper relationship with you. The idea of the meditation is to read it (or listen to it) as if Jesus is sitting in the room with you. Imagine His voice. Imagine the look on His face as He talks to you about how precious you are to Him. It begins with Him standing at the door of your heart, knocking. A familiar image, right? I bet we’ve all seen a painting of the scene.

What keeps us from opening the doors of our hearts fully and not just letting Him into the entryway, but all the way into the crevices of our hearts?

As I pondered the question, imagining Jesus sitting in the pew in front of me, turned around to look at me, I thought about what keeps me from letting people deep into my house. Because let’s face it–many of us have those places guests aren’t welcome, right? The door we keep closed, because it’s where we’ve shoved the mess, or the part we never bother cleaning up, or the basement storage that just isn’t fit for view. I readily admit I’m not a great housekeeper, so when you come to my house, you’re not going to see my master bedroom with the desk piled high with all the things waiting to be filed, or the master bathroom with all the laundry I haven’t gotten around to folding and putting away.

I’m not proud of the mess, but it piles up more quickly than I can find the time to deal with it. So what would I need to let people that deeply in? I mentally smirked and answered: A housekeeper.

And I imagined Jesus smirking right back. I imagined Him joking with me. “You want me to be your spiritual housekeeper?”

It seems a little insulting for the King of kings, I know, so I quickly said, “Well, no…actually, kinda. I do want you to be my heartkeeper.”

It’s funny to think of. I mean, we all know that He doesn’t expect us to get “cleaned up” before we let Him in. We know that He’s the one that does the cleaning. And not just a top-level shine, not if we truly let Him work. He cleans out the cabinets and organizes the drawers. He throws out all the expired stuff in the pantry. He wades through the mess on the floor of the closet and helps us sort out what clothes deserve hanger space and what should just be gotten rid of. He’ll even remember to vacuum under furniture and dust those top shelves we can never reach. Why? Because He loves us, and He wants to know every part of us.

He wants every part of us to become Him. To be so permeated by His spirit that there’s nothing left we cling to as ours. We only cling to Him, because we are His.

Then…then a beautiful thing happens. As the Spirit works in this spiffy space Jesus has made, things start to grow. Our house turns into an estate with gardens, with vineyards, with fields. Trees bud and bloom and grow fruit. Fruit of love, of joy, of peace. Fruit of patience and kindness and goodness, of faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.

But that fruit…it isn’t for us. That’s something I mused about back in 2020 in a post I still love. Fruit is not for the sustenance of the tree. Fruit is not for the sake of the plant that bears it. Fruit is for others. Fruit is meant to be a tempting morsel for animals to enjoy so that they then spread the seeds.

It’s no accident that Paul likens our spiritual growth to fruit. We’re not meant to grow just for our own sakes. We’re meant to grow so that others want a taste. So that the seeds of eternal life are scattered, so that they can take root, so that they can grow in others.

We have to let Jesus into those shadows of our heart so that His work can dig down deep, so that we can then produce fruit to nourish the souls of others, so that they want to invite Him in too.

Because Jesus thirsts for me…and He also thirsts for YOU. He thirsts for THEM. He thirsts for all of us. There isn’t a soul ever to be born on this planet that our good Father doesn’t love so much, that Jesus doesn’t yearn to know. Fully. Completely. Inside and out. Every crack and crevice.

I think for many of us, it isn’t that we intentionally say, “This far and no farther, Lord.” I think for most of us, we’re just lazy. “This far” seems good enough, because opening that other door will take time we don’t have. We forget. We get so caught up in our exterior lives that we don’t have the energy for the internal.

But you know what, friends? He’s standing right beside us. He’s sitting right there, watching. He’s smiling, and He’s patient, and He isn’t going anywhere. Because when you’re thirsty, really thirsty, you don’t just take a sip of water and then walk away from the glass, do you? You keep it in your hand and your drink until you’ve had your fill.

He’s never going to have His fill of us. So He’ll keep us always in His hand. And our hearts…He’ll keep those too, and make them not into a showcase, but into a working, living, breathing, growing, bountiful estate. An estate with its gates flung wide. And estate producing fruit.

Do you hear Him knocking today?

The Fruit of the Spirit image above was created by AI to be based on the colorful style of Leonid Afremov; I then added the written fruits and tucked them into the paint daubs. We now have it printed on canvas and displayed in our bedroom, beside an actual Leonid Afremov painting.