by Rev. Eric Folkerth

“Where did these rooms come from?
And who put them in here?
Who had these curtains hung?
And who ordered this chandelier?

From the very first time,
I heard your gentle cry,
The love of a life had begun.

And as I walk through new parts
Of this well-travelled heart,
I wonder, where did these rooms come from?”

These words are lyrics from a song I wrote for Maria soon after she was born. To this day they’re the best way I know to describe what it felt like, to me, to be a new father and to see my daughter for the very first time.

In that moment —and it really did feel like it happened instantaneously— it suddenly felt as if entirely new rooms had opened up in my heart.

I was thirty-years-old at the time and I assumed I knew my heart intimately. I’d been around the block. My heart had been broken and put back together several times. At that age you start to think you know yourself pretty well.

And I’d been present when the babies of friends and family had been born so I knew to expect joy, love, peace, and the like. What I didn’t expect —what struck me with profound wonderment— was just how much more expansive my heart felt in that moment.

But suddenly, what was there was…far more ROOM. It literally, instantaneously, felt bigger.

It was like that line in the Dr. Seuss story:

“Well, in Whoville they say
– that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day.”

That was it, right there. I mean, I knew I’d likely love my daughter deeply. What I didn’t at all expect was how much *bigger* it made my heart feel. And so I wrote this song to try and describe the wonder of the moment.

When Jesus describes where he is going, near the end of the Gospel of John, he says this:

“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

God has a special place in God’s heart for each of us. God’s heart is like a mansion with many rooms…or a heart with many chambers.

Inside the heart of God there is a room that is your room. It’s a room that opened up from the moment you were born and will now exist into eternity.

I believe God changes the world but that the world also changes God. This means that God’s love genuinely *increases* through our very existence of lives and through our very being. We are meant to understand this deeply.

Like the parent/child bond, we are meant to trust that God’s love *expands God* from the moment of our birth and all throughout our lives. And one of the ways God’s love increases is through this room that God makes for each of us.

Our room inside God’s heart is a place we can go to find comfort, renewal, strength, courage, and hope. It’s a room we can experience now in our world through our life of prayer and meditation. And it’s a room we will know fully in that time yet to come.

One of the things loving teaches you is that love can never be “lost.” We commonly seem to think that…if we love and the love is not or cannot be returned, somehow it’s “lost.” But that’s not actually how love works.

Loving others *increases* love in us and increases love in our world, too.
Loving breaks up our hearts, even in the times when love breaks our hearts.

That love I felt for Maria —those new rooms that opened up on the day she was born— they are still there. And even now, every time I think of her, my heart leaps a little.

I think it’s the same with God. Every time God remembers us —or we remember God— God’s heart leaps a little, too. God takes joy in our mere existence in the world and wants us to understand the gift of our lives.

Even if your heart has been battered and bruised, trust that deep within the heart of God there is a room that is yours and yours alone.

You are safe there; you can trust that space.
And you can visit it any time you need the comfort of “home.”

Grace and Peace,

Eric Folkerth