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Our Hearts


          The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.” (Jeremiah 19:9-10)

         Yesterday, in response to something I said, someone told me that I must be very insecure. My response to her was that she should not try to psychoanalyze me, as she lacked the expertise. It’s something we all do, and something some of us strive to do better. There are models of personality types and behavior groupings. Criminal profiling is based on the idea that statistics about people can help us better guess what sort of people are likely to commit a specific crime. 
        We apply the same models to ourselves. I’m an ISTJ, a melancholy (with some choleric tendencies), a Cd, an Earth, (I think) an otter with a little lion thrown in, and a 1. Oh, and to include a more Eastern flavor, my blood type is A positive. 
        No matter how much (self) analysis we undergo, and in spite of our claims that we make our own choices, we still find ourselves as a loss to understand why we did or said something. So much of the reason we act as we do seems to lie outside of our consciousness and will. Viktor Frankl discussed this in The Search for Meaning. He taught that we tend to go from stimulus to response without thought or consciousness, and that freedom involves our learning to insert thought between stimulus and response. More often, after reacting to some circumstance, we say, “I don’t know why I did/said that!” 
        This doesn’t mean that we never know why or that we are entirely out of control, but it should give us reason to pause before we make claims about someone having a good heart (including ourselves.) We like to think our hearts are in the right place, but our hearts tend to be more complicated than we want to believe. 
        Better that we should believe what God tells us. And if we can'y be sober in our judgment of ourselves, it is better if we think our hearts more wicked than God does and learn that we were wrong than to think our hearts wonderful and learn that we are wrong.

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