As a child, I remember hearing a lot about "inviting Jesus into [my] heart". About saying "the Sinner's Prayer" and hearing, at Sunday School, all those warnings about what would happen if we didn't have Jesus in our hearts.
Now, I find all that language rather jarring.
I know now that that language is just too thin.
I'm rather disillusioned about the capacities of my heart. It simply isn't all that spacious enough a place to accommodate a guy like Jesus. Or, more accurately, it's not a place he'd want to take up residence.
When I think of my heart as a house for Jesus, I now see it in a rather different way than I saw it as a child: To start with, it's far too small. If Jesus is going to live here, there will have to be extensions. And it's all looking pretty rundown. The roof leaks. Mold is growing on the walls. The front door is hanging off its hinges. There are strange smells in the hallway. Weeds are growing up through the floorboards. Jesus is moving into my heart not because these surroundings are fit for him, but because he enjoys the challenge of fixing up old places like this -- a broken-down dump of a house.
God arrives, suitcase in hand, and knocks on the door of our heart. And he can hardly fit inside. The place is too small. And it's a mess, a ruin, a veritable pigsty. Yet God isn't deterred. God wants to live here: The place has a lot of promise; and besides, God likes the neighborhood. So there's only one for it: God rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.
What I'm describing here is what we Christians call a conversion. It's a condition that will continue for the rest of my life. God renovates slowly, persistently, with boundless patience, and with loving attention to even the smallest details. My whole life will be nothing but the story of God's renovation. My whole life is one of God's repair projects. It's not the once-off experiences that matter -- not any single episode of inviting Jesus into my heart. What matters is the process; what matters is that my heart gradually becomes bigger, wider, cleaner, more orderly. What matters is that it slowly becomes, over a whole lifetime, an inhabitable place for God.