Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The List

              Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,   through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;   perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)           Think about it. We have been justified. At least, we could be justified if we stopped insisting that our justification be based on our merits. We have peace with God, or could have peace if we stopped throwing temper tantrums. We have gained access into grace i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meditations of the Heart

  May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm19:14)           As I started writing this post, I noted that the meditations of my heart are all over the mental landscape, from a hub where eight superhighways come together to a lunar or nuclear landscape. Do you see my error? The moment I read the word meditation , I think about thoughts. But what’s described here is the meditations of our hearts ; our wills.           While the meditations of our minds may be all over the place, the meditations of our wills tend to be a little more stable by the time we are adults. We no longer tend to want to pursue the ten separate careers we did in any given day as children. Part of this is humble acceptance of reality. We come to understand that we can’t do it all. I think another part of it is disappointmen...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Way, The Truth, and The Life

              Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me . (John 14:6)           If “I am the gate of the sheep…I am the good shepherd” from chapter 10 is a double whammy, this verse is a triple whammy. And its first victim is the notion that any other so-called god was acceptable or the same as Jesus. He, and He alone is the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to get to the Father. There is no other Savior, or Redeemer, according to Jesus. Now, to be fair, other religions will claim that their religion or god(s) are the only way. That is the nature of gods and of religions. If this and that are equally good and agree on what’s necessary, then this and that are the same thing, so there’s no need to from the other to one. If that’s the case, then why speak against the other or promote the one? There’s a song I’ve been listening to i...
Post a Comment
Read more