Deceptive Hearts

          Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

          The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)

          Their heart is deceitful, and now they must bear their guilt. The Lord will demolish their altars and destroy their sacred stones. (Hosea 10:2)

          “Why, my soul, are you downcast?” This is a question I’ve faced over the past couple days. There was and is nothing any more wrong in my life than there has been for most of my life. Sure, there is COVID-19 and the societal collapse brought about by governors trying to solve the COVID-19 problem. Sure, there is the social disintegration brought about by hatred and our inept attempts to impose fixes on society. Those could both be reasons to despair, and I considered the fact that I had been emotionally involved in both those issues for a while, that I might be worn down, burned out. Etc. But it’s not unusual for me to get caught up in issues, and I’ve hit emotional exhaustion walls with issues before. They weren’t like this. 
           I’ve been depressed before, but never to the point where I could not come up with a passage or at least something to say in this blog. But this time, I spent all day fussing over what to write about and got nothing. It broke my heart to write what I posted.  Yesterday, it came to mind that I had added a supplement to my regimen. I pulled it back out, and this morning. I’m feeling better. I won’t tell what the supplement was, because it’s not the fault of the supplement. It was an experiment that did what I didn’t need (lowered my blood sugar) but didn’t do what I did need (lowered my sugar-hunger.) Please no “words of wisdom” – this is a summer of experimentation and that one didn’t work and yes, I’m being careful.
        All of that to say what the other two passages for the day say: that the soul, the heart, and mind, our inner selves are deceitful. They lie to us, and they are mistaken. Sometimes, they tell us that something is very wrong, but they don’t tell us what – or they tell us the wrong what. I’ve faced depression before, and I have learned that I have to power through them. Just keep moving. That would not have been helpful here.
          This is why we need to be careful, terribly careful. Our society is suffering from multiple maladies. Among others, some of our neighbors with darker skin are claiming that they have been oppressed for hundreds of years, and – to some extent understandably – they are blaming all their neighbors with light skin. At the same time, they are allying themselves with people who hold beliefs that have long been used to oppress them. They are like the children to run to their abusers, desperate to placate them and gain approval. They are like abused spouses who return to their abusers. They have Stockholm Syndrome, meaning that they have developed positive feelings toward the person holding them captive and abusing them, they develop negative feelings toward police, authority figures, or anyone who might be trying to help them get away from their captor. They may even refuse to cooperate against their captor, and they begin to …believe they have the same goals and values. And so, those who say our darker-skinned neighbors are not oppressed are wrong, but so are those who say that everyone with light skin is doing it. Those responsible are the ones to whom they have traditionally turned. They cannot trust their hearts, because they hearts, having been deceived, now deceive them.