How’s your heart
We begin our journey again through the book by Andy Stanley titled “Enemies of the Heart”. The basic idea of the book is to grasp the idea that there is opposition to our happiness. That we have this internal aspect of us that gets impacted by others and by our selves.
The heart we are referring to is that mysterious, wonderful, confusing part of us that enables us to love, laugh, fear, and experience life.
In Christian community, the questions are asked “How’s your heart”, and typically speaking the reference is to you belief and trust in God and Jesus. But what if we changed the question to push in a bit differently…
- Lately, have you been able to laugh freely? To smile and delight in a conversation with others? Do you allow a joke or comic notion to make you chuckle?
- Lately, have you had compassion, sorrow and care for another person? Is your emotions impacted by the situation of others?
- Lately, are there things that bother you internally? Maybe that stinging sensation by knee that you can’t figure out why. Maybe the fact that you have realized that you can’t lift your right arm as high as your left arm. Your ankle is hurting more than usual. But you don’t mention it to anyone. You know you are spending more money that you should and you will do better. Did you participate or publicly share or laugh and talk about inappropriate topics?
- Lately, how are you experiencing life?
All of those questions probe our heart in more ways than just do we trust in God.
How’s your heart?
Life can be hard on the heart. The world is full of outside influences that have the power to disrupt the rhythm of our heart. Over time we develop habits that slowly erode our heart’s sensitivity. We have experienced many emotions and there are just some we don’t want to experience again. In the book Andy described getting his heart broke by a little girl that “just wanted to be friends”.
What is the earliest heart break you can recall? Was it a girl? Was it losing a relative or pet? What broke your heart at a young age?
What has broke your heart in the last 6 months?
The crazy fact is that all of our lives we have worked to prevent our heart from being hurt like what we have experienced. Now we are older, and hopefully wiser than that first heart break, but in reality, we still experience heart break. In most cases, the heart breaks we experience as we get older are actually more intense. It is like we can protect our heart from the simple things that used to impact us, and be define BOUNDARIES to protect our heart.
We don’t really stop the attacks on our heart from occurring, but we come to accept the disrupters as part of us, part of our personality. We then catch ourselves saying things such as “that is just the way I am”, “that is just the way they are”…
Really? Is it that easy to deny?
Think for a moment. How are things in our heart? Not our career, not where we volunteer or serve; not our family; not our finances; but our heart.
When we pause, we typically get a vision or an idea of reality that we don’t like, that we are ashamed of, sad about or disappointed about, and we quickly shift our attention to something else. There are emails to read, lawns to mow, bills to pay, bible devotions to read, we don’t have time to worry about those emotions and challenges of our heart. We can quickly declare “I’m fine. I’ll get over it. It doesn’t really matter”. Wow, if that was the answer you got from your doctor when you went in with an issue, how would you feel about that prognosis?
Perhaps that major reason we rarely stop and monitor our hearts is that it was never encouraged as we grew up. In many cases, we just tried to avoid the pain and we wanted to be accepted. We learned to modify our behavior to avoid pain, and we have been doing it ever since.
We have gotten older learning about decisions and consequences. If we don’t like the results of a decision we made, we just don’t make that decision again. We have become much better at monitoring our behavior than our hearts.
Most of it is a facade where we put on a good front, or so we think. In simple terms it is pretending. Pretending things did not hurt our feelings; pretending that we were not disappointed about something or someone’s behavior; pretending we are happy; pretending we are strong; pretending….
Pretending allows us to ignore the true condition of our heart. We believe that as long as we can say the right thing and do the right thing, we are tempted to believe all is well.
Our heart is under assault, and it could be that we are losing. Not the war, but the battles. We might even be on a losing steak. It could be that the assault was not great, but we are getting weak, we are neglecting our heart and some things that don’t typically bother us have been doing some real damage lately.
How’s your heart? Has the reality of pretending things are alright getting tiring? Are you in a losing season? Are their challenges that are looming that you are trying to avoid, hoping they will get better or just go away?
Not as it seems
The book shared the story of “Pistol Pete” Maravich. How he was a great basketball player, but ended up dying of a heart attack at the age of 40. Every thing looked good on the outside, but he had a fatal heart condition.
Behavior isn’t always an accurate indicator of what’s going on inside.
So what is our challenge? Where does this leave us? What can we do to shift our behavior? That is not as simple as it seems. If the source of our issue was simply a few behavioral habits, we would have conquered them already. If the solution were “try harder” we would have licked the problems by now.
In the coming chapters, we will unfold some interesting aspects of life as we know it.
ASSIGNMENT: Read Chapter 3 & 4
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