Their Hearts Burned Within Them

Their Hearts Burned Within Them
By Anton Dorph

“And then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished from their sight. They said to one another, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us when He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?’”
Luke 24:31-32

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In Luke 24, we read of two heartbroken disciples walking the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion. Their world had seemingly just collapsed. Jesus, in whom they had placed all their hope, was gone. A Stranger joined them as they walked, and their hearts “burned within” them as He responded to their anguish with words of comfort and hope. Only in hindsight, after the Stranger had vanished from their sight, did they realize that it was the resurrected Lord that had been with them all along.

This story captures something each of us experiences: it is often only after a difficult trial or a season of doubt or confusion that we look back and see the Lord’s hand guiding, comforting, and even carrying us. Dieter F. Uchtdorf once taught: “Often the deep valleys of our present will be understood only by looking back on them from the mountains of our future experience. Often we can’t see the Lord’s hand in our lives until long after trials have passed.”  But the promise of the Gospel is that He is always there. As Christian missionary Elisabeth Elliott put it, “God’s story never ends with ‘ashes.’”

And yet sometimes, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, our eyes are “holden” and we cannot yet see what the Lord is doing. It may simply be that we are too fixated on our worries and griefs to notice hearts already burning within us. But later—whether days, months, or even years afterward—we come to recognize that He was walking with us and comforting us all along. In C.S. Lewis’s words: “What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery, turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts, memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.” 

We may not always recognize the Savior while He walks beside us, but we can be assured that, as Corrie ten Boom testified, “Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.”  And in time, we will look back and perceive that our hearts were burning within us and that our deserts of trial were, in truth, wells of living water.

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