Just after a winter sun rose scarlet across snow white fields, I find a curled newborn lamb shivering, still freshly wet, in the corner of the chilled tiny barn.
The narrow way is the only way to life.
Sometime in the still dark of the early dawn hours, she’d made her way down the dark and narrowest of passageways – the birth canal – and slipped out into this cold world and she trembles.
Since the beginning of time, ours births down the narrow canal testifies to the larger, cosmic truth:
The narrow way is the only way to life.
In the days just before Passover, in the days just right after Palm Sunday, in this midst of all these tired pilgrims making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the temple with their sin sacrifice, there were more than a quarter of a million crying lambs being herded through the streets of Jerusalem, lambs to be slain for Passover and the sins of all the people trying to find the narrow way.
The question I have to answer every day is: What does it mean to let your heart expand wide while taking the narrow way?
Sometime after the sun warmed mid-sky, after I try to get the newborn lamb up to it’s mother to nuzzle that full udder, hungry for those first swallows of milky life, a friend reaches out to ask how I’m navigating, how we’re all called to keep navigating all the things along the obstacle course that is life, and I find myself writing back:
The question I have to answer every day is: What does it mean to let your heart expand wide while taking the narrow way?
This is always the way: Narrow way. Expansive heart.
The narrow way leads to more than the expansive life; the narrow way leads to an expansive heart.
This is always the way: Narrow way. Expansive heart.
“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that lead to destruction,” says Jesus, the Lamb of God who is the Way. “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
The way of sin is wide-open and easy—- but it narrows until life becomes crushing. The way to the fullest life? This way is as hard as it is worthy.
The way to the fullest life is narrow, but it expands the sidewalls of your heart into a spacious place full of grace.
She tells me she’s writing that down, carrying that with her, the way through: Narrow way. Expansive heart.
I tell her that I don’t know this way — at all, but this is the way I’m learning. This narrow way, with an expansive heart, this can only be a work of God. The only way to know this way through life is to intimately know the Way Himself, and let the Way Himself do that holy, heart-expansive work in me, His ways above mine.
The pathway of least resistance leads to the least life. And it’s only the narrow pathway, of great resistance, that leads to the great life.
I intimately trace the outline of His heart as the sun rises, reading now every morning through the book of Jeremiah, lingering with the curvature of His face and His ways, as purpose to do what I read, and what He whispers:
“Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where the good way is, And walk in it; Then you will find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6:16)
Ask for the ancient way, ask where the good way is, to find the way to rest for your soul.
And Jesus Himself answers the prophet Jeremiah’s words:
“Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:29).
The way of the Cross is the only way to come across any rest for your soul.
Echoing the very same words of Jeremiah 6:16, where God said the ancient way is the good way to find rest for your souls – now Jesus is saying He Himself fulfills Jeremiah 6:16, that He is the ancient way, the good way, the narrow way, THE WAY, to find rest for your soul.
Ask for the narrow way of Jesus, and, however the wind blasts and the storms hit, don’t wander away from the way He carried His cross, don’t wander from the way that carries a cross.
The way of the Cross is the only way to come across any rest for your soul.
Real rest for your soul is found when you leave the rest — and take the narrow way of the cross with its expansive beams that stretch a heart wide open to real life.
Those looking for something sacred travel slow. Those looking for the holy linger.
After the sun dips down into winter fields and the twilight thickens blue, after I’ve sat in the piled hay of the tiny barn, in the warming glow of the heat lamp, to bury my hand in the tight curls of the newborn lamb to feel her heat, to feel her tummy filled with the thick rich of filling colostrum, I curl up on the couch with our youngest to read to her the last pages of her E.B. White chapter book that her and I have been working our way through together, and I catch on this one line:
“A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”
And I pause here. And my soul stills.
Taking the Way of Jesus takes time. It takes time to take the narrow way that births a large-hearted life.
Those who aren’t looking for anything worthwhile, think it’s only worthwhile to travel fast.
And that wide way beckons to the fast and the furious, to the hustlers and fear-mongers, to the big and loud, to the angry and soul-hungry and joy-malnourished.
But there is another way.
Those looking for something sacred travel slow.
Those looking for the holy linger.
The way of genuine spiritual formation is slow. Taking the Way of Jesus takes time.
It takes time to take the narrow way that births a large-hearted life.
And there’s a way to slowly enter into Holy Week by the narrow gate, by the narrow way, to take the Way of the Cross, and pilgrimage with God, and linger with Love that lays Himself down.
And feel your heart expand with love, because Love Himself moves right into the deepest chambers of your heart – the love of the only One who has ever loved you to death and back to the fullest life.
In the middle of the night, I slip back out into the freezing night air, to check on the newborn lamb, to see if it needs to be picked up and returned to the safe circle of warmth under the heat lamp.
And the Lamb of God picks up all the willing at the beginning of Holy Week – so they can pick up their cross and pilgrimage with Him on the narrow way to real life.
Dawn is coming, just not the expected way.
Take Time to Linger on a Transformative Holy Week Pilgrimage
Enter into Holy Week with a Holy Week Pilgrimage — a free tool with these illustrated, Scripture cards to help you encounter Jesus through Holy Week, inspired by the Stations of the Cross.
Linger each day of Holy week with Love laid down — so you can rise up and be love.
Take a pilgrimage on the Way of the Cross this Holy Week — slow and steep in each day’s scripture and gaze on the Lamb of God – and feel yourself move through the narrow gate into the narrow way that expands your heart.
