follow your heart

if you know me at all, you know that i love to read. since i was a kid, books are refuges, escapes, adventures, and dreams. i went through a brief period in college when books ceased to be fun (i think it was because i was an english major and reading became work and i had to read some hideous novels), but i am back in love with books. (if you love reading too, be my friend on goodreads.com ).

i recently finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlho while i was in China (which i hope to post about at some point in the near future). i loved it deeply. i think i cried while finishing it in the Shanghai airport. here are some of my favorite excerpts:

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
"Every second of the search is an encounter with God," the boy told his heart. "When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I've known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve."

*****

"Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "We, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures , because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them - the path to their Personal Legends, and to happiness...So we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we hope that our words won't be heard: we don't want people to suffer because they don't follow their hearts."
"Why don't people's hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams?" the boy asked the alchemist.
"Because that's what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don't like to suffer."
From then on, the boy understood his heart. He asked it, please, never to stop speaking to him. He asked that, when he wandered far from his dreams, his heart press him and sound the alarm. The boy swore that, every time he heard the alarm, he would heed its message.

*****

some of it sounds a little "self-help/self-realization - ish," but if you are a committed follower of Jesus, i think there's something for you in The Alchemist. how often our dreams and our hearts get beaten up by the world, by despair, by the devil. and how often we need our hearts to be revived by hope, dreams, possibilities, resurrection.

may my heart never die completely. may the suffering never overwhelm me. Jesus, stay alive in me always.