When Crickets Cry

by Charles Martin

I turned my head sideways, sort of corkscrewing my eyes, and decided that heaven looked like a giant granite countertop turned upside down and framing the sky.

If God was down here drinking His coffee, then He was on his second cup, because He’d already Windexed the sky. Only the streaks remained.

Four anniversaries had come and gone while I remained in this nowhere place. Even the crickets were quiet.

Her Southern drawl was tangy sweet, soft and raspy. It dripped with little girlness and drew attention like fireworks on the Fourth.

And there, I remembered that I was once good at something, and that I once knew love. The thought echoed inside me: I am poured out like water, and all My bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; it is melted within Me.

How I tried to turn back time, to fly around the earth like Superman, to pray like Joshua or Hezekiah and stop the sun. But there are no do-overs in life.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”

“That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

No, I’ll not weep: I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws or ere I’ll weep.

Saint Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Puzzles forced me to look at something from several angles before I moved on, to look again, and again, and possibly again because each piece—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—was critical to the whole.

maybe life is like that—you never know when something that’s been hidden is going to rise up and bite you, or glow with a golden hue.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

“Life is where the blood flows.”

I began to notice one problem: if I was going to science to find life and understand how to bring that back to a dying, diseased human heart, I had gone to the wrong place.

I want to get in the business of making God-shaped cheeseburgers.”

The entire place is one well-disguised billboard for God.

Love is no tool; neither is a woman’s heart.

I was learning that getting well and finding healing are two very different things.

“A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.”

The human heart is remarkable in that it is designed to pump continuously for a hundred and twenty years without ever needing to be reminded what it was meant to do.

if anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart.

God gives most of us mortals normal hearts and lungs. To others, He gives a little more.

The heart is not only the most unselfish of organs, it is also the most courageous and faithful.

She looked down, and the crickets fell quiet, making a low, almost inaudible chatter, as if they obeyed or observed something I knew nothing about. It was like a song you could hear only if you weren’t trying to listen, or a far-off star that you could see only when you weren’t focusing, and then only out of the corner of your eye.

“Only if you listen closely, and you want to, can you hear when crickets cry.”

You don’t hear them with your ears.” She poked me in the chest gently with her finger. “You hear them with your heart.”

O! the world hath not a sweeter creature; she might lie by an emperor’s side and command him tasks.

“Never forget, the best is the enemy of the good.”

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.”

She just shook her head and watched both everything and nothing all at once.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart.”

“Sometimes, I see better than those who still have their eyes.”

Sometimes the memory of love is so strong that it edges out most everything else.”

Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it.

hope lives here, and death can’t kill it.”

For every pump of the atrium, we might get two or three pumps of the ventricle. It’s like two people dancing, arm in arm, but one is listening to Dean Martin”—he looked at me—“while the other is listening to Elvis.”

Life is where the blood flows.

The point is that hell is separate from love. If Lucifer knows anything, he knows that.

I held the symbol of life in my hands and marveled just as much then as I had the first time in my anatomy class. This is it. The wellspring.