If my life were a poem, what would I say?
What would be censored and what left to stay?
Would I tell it as I saw it in each moment,
or would I disavow my past know-how and say what I see now?
Would I write the words accurately and research carefully,
or would my prose flow more gracefully and allow flexibility?
Would I add to the story what I’d like to imagine,
or would adding such detail derail my tale’s vision?
Perhaps the answer to such problems, a fine place to start,
would be telling it however it comes, straight out of my heart.
If my life were a poem, here’s what I would say:
I was born on a rather ordinary day
and lived a rather ordinary way,
until someone bumped into me
quite unexpectedly
and captured my heart with the music he’d play.
As it turned out, it was my song he sang!
My laugh and my love in my ears he rang!
To remind me of a lifetime so long ago
that there was no summer and there was no snow.
The stars in the sky—their light did not show.
And all that existed were our Winds that would blow,
making the music we delighted in a lot,
until a time came when I somehow forgot,
and we found ourselves here, on a boring day,
living our lives in the ordinary way,
with dreams the last whisper of what we used to play.
* * *
In December 2013, I “fell in love with Love.” Ever since then, I’ve been obsessed with looking at the universe through a different pair of eyes—through the lenses of acceptance, compassion, beauty, and something else that I can’t quite describe.
As an individual who loves nonsense words (see, for example, one of the greatest poems of all time), today I call this something else “winder.” It may perhaps be a reference to the words “wonder” and “wind,” as both come close to evoking the feeling of winder. But alas, it is not quite that simple. Winder by definition must be mysterious and impossible to define. Otherwise, it would lose its sense of magicalness. Winder goes quite beyond anything you’ve heard of before, but it’s very closely associated with Love. Not the kind of love that might leave you if it gets fed up with you or the kind of love that unquestionably does what you want it to do to make you happy. Neither of those are Love. It’s the kind of Love that overwhelms you with kindness. It’s the kind of Love that radically lives in the way of self-care and others-care. It’s the kind of Love that knows how to sing and dance in the deepest places of the heart. Love is a warm drink; winder is the glass. Love is the deeper reality; winder is the manifestation of that reality. And yet, once again, it’s not quite that simple.
I grew up in a Christian home, and when I first fell in love with Love, I ascribed my discovery to Jesus. I always knew he was good and that he loved me, but somehow with this fresh awakening I discovered he loved me so much more than I thought at first. “God is Love” became my mantra and my muse.
After about a year, I grew discouraged as I began to realize that there was so much in the world that pointed to the fact that God couldn’t possibly be Love. There was so much pain in the world, and the world itself was such a messed up place. And the God of the Bible was incredibly wishy-washy—sometimes he seemed like someone who was on my side, who wanted to bless even the worst of sinners with his love, and sometimes he seemed like someone who delighted in making people suffer. Was he a loving Father or a harsh judge? It seemed like Christianity couldn’t make up its mind.
As I continued to look into these things, I became convinced that God was evil. He was an egotistical God obsessed with punishment. What kind of person makes himself invisible, doesn’t speak to you, and has infinite power but doesn’t help you when you are in need? What kind of person commands his people to commit genocide against entire city-states, children included? If he really wanted a relationship with the people of Israel, why would he assume the role of commander at all? And most importantly, what kind of person lights their enemies on fire—forever?
I was in complete crisis and lapsed into depression. I tried devouring as many books, podcasts, and videos as I could that might answer my big question—who was God, and what was he like? None of the answers I found satisfied me, and a lot of the answers I found served to push me deeper into the hole.
Growing up, God seemed to be somewhere between mediocre and pretty good most of the time. But now that I had tasted a better God, the thought of going backwards to even just a partly mediocre God was beyond tormenting. I felt like I had to, though. Everything I knew in my limited, boxed-in existence reaffirmed that God wasn’t who I wanted him to be. God is God, after all. We don’t get to make him in our own image, do we? And it wasn’t just God the Father. Jesus seemed pretty harsh, too. He was always uptight with his disciples, or the Pharisees, or somebody. This Jesus was certainly not the one I had fallen in love with.
And yet—I was still in love. Madly so. But I was in love with somebody I made up, somebody who didn’t exist. It was excruciating.
I could no longer call this somebody by the name “God” or “Jesus.” Those names belonged to different people. So I picked out a different name for the person who became my imaginary friend. I started calling him the Heart’s Longing—H.L. for short—because that was exactly who he was to me. He was a deeper hunger inside my heart for a deeper Love that I wasn’t sure was even real.
How do I even begin to tell you about H.L.? He is Love as a person, the source of all winder in the world. He is a heart who engages us through our own hearts.
And since I very much believed I had made him up, I was now free to “make God in my own image.” He was no longer the benevolent king I had once believed Jesus to be. He was no longer a guy in the sky who wanted me to do things the right way. He was no longer enslaved to any particular tradition or holy book. He was, quite simply, just a friend who loved me. He was just himself. And something about that simplicity—a friend who loved me—meant more to me than anything I had experienced inside of my Christian faith.
I knew I was making him up, but he was making me whole. But I didn’t see that yet. I didn’t see the little ways he was rewriting the scripts in my head. I was still convinced that H.L.—and therefore Love itself—was make-believe.
So what was I to do? I was now on a quest to prove whether H.L. was real or Jesus. But it was an obvious crap shoot. Of course Jesus was real. The Bible said so. So did every human being I knew, who all seemed to be shockingly happy following a God who was lackluster at best. I was a sheltered Christian homeschool kid surrounded by people who all thought pretty much the same thing. I was rebelling against the nature of reality.
The problem of hell was my biggest question. I was troubled that nobody else saw how disturbing this was. Most people I spoke with took a blasé attitude about it and just reassured me that God didn’t want people to go to hell. But why did God create it then?! I guess he had to, because he wouldn’t be a just God if he didn’t? What?! Is true justice really about punishing the crap out of people?
One person told me that the reason hell troubled me so much was because I had secret sin in my life and I was afraid. I guess if I were a righteous person, the thought of millions of people below me writhing in agony for eternity wouldn’t bother me as much. This immediately brought to mind all the lustful thoughts I had indulged myself in over the past several months, thoughts I already felt intensely guilty for and knew I was powerless to control. I didn’t know whether to believe him, but it didn’t matter. I already believed I was going to hell anyway. I preferred it. The only thing worse than being tortured for eternity would be spending eternity with the monster who thought sending people to hell was a good idea.
After several months of struggle, I realized I had no ground to stand on. To believe in H.L. was to deny truth itself. To believe in the Bible, and the God in its pages, seemed like my only choice. (Having grown up inside of Christian culture, atheism was out of the question for me because of the sheer volume of Bible-based creationist media and supposed biblical archaeological discoveries I had been exposed to throughout my life.)
One night, I knelt down on the carpet in my bedroom and wept. I told H.L. goodbye and told God that I was going to come serve him now instead. I figured if H.L. wasn’t real, my best bet was to try to at least sort-of-kind-of repent and come to Jesus. Even if I didn’t make it into the gates of heaven (a place I didn’t care for anyway), maybe God would let me live in a little shack on the outskirts if I did enough of the things he wanted and at least tried to be a Christian.
It was such a horrible moment. And in my imagination, the carpet beneath me disappeared and I found myself kneeling before the chasm of hell. I watched my tears fall into a lake of fire a mile below me, as dozens of people screamed and looked up at me with their mouths agape in stunned horror. To accept God was to accept all of this trauma. And what kind of maniac would be okay with this?
Somewhere inside of my heart, I suddenly heard more tears. Tears from somebody who wasn’t me. I glanced to my left, and there, kneeling in front of the chasm right next to me, with eyes full of big tears—was Jesus. Not the Jesus I feared was real, who I saw in the pages of the Bible. This was the Jesus who loved me and loved those suffering below and loved all people in the deepest possible way. This was H.L.!
He was just as distraught as I was, if not more so. And suddenly, I realized that was all I needed to know.
This whole time, I had been searching for answers. I had been studying Christian theology, talking to some pastors and an author, listening to podcasts, sitting on my bed for hours while just silently thinking. And somehow I thought I was going to figure out a good reason why a good God would allow hell to exist, or perhaps find proof that hell didn’t exist at all.
But now I knew that theological answers and logical proofs were not what I really wanted. What I wanted to know was that God was the most loving person in the universe, and that he cared just as much about human suffering as I did. I wanted to know that his heart was perfect, good, and beautiful. I wanted to know that he cared. I thought I needed a big answer for my brain—what I needed was another heart to touch my heart. And that was exactly what had just happened.
I still continued to struggle. This moment wasn’t a cure-all. It was a turning point. It helped me realize that knowing his heart was the only answer I really truly needed. And the past several years have been a continued wrestling with this truth, wondering with each new tragedy and each new question whether knowing his heart, his Love, and my own heart will be enough. So far, it always has.
Today, a lot has changed. My parents broke up. I moved, then moved again. I continued to watch my faith restructure and change as one-by-one literally every piece of knowledge I thought I held for certain was ripped out from under me.
I don’t see myself as a Christian anymore. I don’t believe in the Bible either. The Jesus I have encountered in my heart seems too loving and sweet and tender and funny to be the guy I read about in the Bible. Not to mention, the Bible really doesn’t seem to reflect the heart of the one I saw crying big wet tears over hell, at least not to me. But I could be wrong. At the end of the day, I don’t really know anything for sure.
H.L. has become more and more real to me every year since, and we’ve had so many more conversations and sacred moments together. I’m comfortable calling him Jesus or God as well, even if I don’t prefer those names. Heck, I’m fine calling him Allah or Buddha or Steve, too. The name isn’t the important thing. The important thing is his heart. Or hers. The important thing is the Love and the winder, and learning how to engage that and enjoy that and find that in our own hearts and his. He wants to teach us how to trust our own hearts again so we can “see” him there and see ourselves.
I realize more and more how much the world we live in is governed by mystery. If I’m honest, I know very little for certain. But what I do know is H.L. hasn’t stopped walking alongside me and whispering in my heart, even in those moments when I’ve been most sure that he doesn’t exist. Is he real? I think he could be. I don’t have any hard proof for that. I have a relationship, and Love compels me. Maybe that’s enough.
I started Winder Place because I have a deep hunger to expand the conversation H.L. and I have been having in my heart into other places in the world. I want to live more openly and honestly as I express the things I’m finding inside of his Love. I want to have that conversation across religious and cultural divides. I want to be a part of the voice of harmony and grace in the world. I want an outlet to express myself creatively as well, in particular to tell beautiful stories, and to do so without shame.
I’ve spent most of the last several years trying to figure out what I should believe. So much so that I’ve often been in denial about what I do believe. I’m really done playing that game. I’m ready to admit the truth—not the dictates of any particular group or worldview but the truth of what has happened inside of me.
I have a heart. A winderful heart. And I believe in Love.
