The Journey of the Heart

The true story of every person in this world is not the story you see, the external story. The true story of each person is the journey of his or her heart. Jesus himself knew that if people lived only in the outer story, eventually they would lose tract of their inner life, the life of their heart he so much desired to redeem. Indeed, it was to the most religious people of his time that Jesus spoke his strongest warnings about a loss of heart.

The inner life, the story of our heart, is the life of the deep places within us, our passions and dreams, our fears and our deepest wounds. It is the unseen life, the mystery within. It does not respond to principles and programs; it seeks not efficiency, but passion. Art, poetry, beauty, mystery, and ecstasy: these are what rouse the heart.

Had you ever experienced waking up one day feeling emotionally down or had felt there is an empty hole inside your heart, longing for something we cannot explain or had you ever been yearning of the love of someone you cared? Had you ever got the feeling that there is a little voice in your heart, which dares to speak to you whether you are in your sole solemn moments or you are in your most busyness times, trying to tell you there is something missing in your life, not knowing it is God speaking to us in our heart? We might not be aware but all of these are what we call “THE JOURNEY OF OUR HEART”.

I. Losing Heart

The life of the heart is a place of great mystery. Yet we have many expressions to help us express this flame of the human soul. We describe a person without compassion as “ heartless” and we urge him or her to “have a heart”. Our deepest hurts we call “heartaches”. Jilted lovers are “brokenhearted”. The truly evil are “black-hearted” and saints have “hearts of gold”. If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a “heart-to-heart” talk. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love “with all our heart”. But when we lose our passion for life, when deadness sets in which we cannot seem to shake, we confess, “My heart’s just not in it”.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how well we performed or what we have accomplished- a life without heart is not worth living. Because it is in our heart that we first hear the voice of God and it is in the heart that we come to know him and learn in his love. So you can see that to lose heart is to lose everything. And a “loss of heart” best describes us today, we become so much addicted in our depressions, heartaches, insecurities, though, God knows, there is enough of these to lose heart. But there is the busyness, the drivenness, and the fact that most of us are living merely to survive. Beneath it we feel empty, lacking, missing something, we feel restless, weary, and vulnerable.

For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God’s presence resides?

Starting very early, life has taught of us to ignore and distrust the deepest yearnings of our heart. Life, for the most part, teaches us to suppress our longing and live only in the external world where efficiency and performance are everything. We have learned from our parents and peers, at school, at work, and even from our spiritual mentors that something else is wanted from us other than our heart, which is to say, that which is most deeply us. Very seldom are we invited to live out of our heart. If we are wanted, we are often wanted for what we can offer functionally. If rich, we are honored for our wealth; If beautiful, for our looks; If intelligent, for our brains. So we learn to offer only those parts of us that are approved, living out a carefully crafted performance to gain acceptance from those who represent life to us. We divorce ourselves from our heart and begin to live a double life.

On the outside, there is the external story of our lives. This is the life everyone sees, our life of work, activities, and church, of family and friends, studying and busyness, and growing older. Our external story is where we carve out the identity most others known. It is the place where we have learned to label each other in a way we can be accepted; It is the place where we only acknowledge and accredit those who perform well, those people whom we know could foment or fit our personality. These, though is hard to admit, it substitutes for meaning, efficiency and busyness substitute for creativity, and acceptance substitutes for love. In the outer life we live from ought (I ought to do this) rather than from desire (I want to do this) and management substitutes for mystery.

There is a spiritual dimension to this external world in our desire to do good works, but communion with God is replaced by activity for God. There is little time in this outer world for deep questions. Given the right plan, everything in life can be managed…except your heart. It cannot be managed like a corporation. The heart does not respond to principles and programs; it seeks not efficiency and acceptance but passion. Again the heart can be aroused by art, poetry, mystery, and ecstasy. Indeed, they are the language that must be spoken if one wishes to speak with the heart. It is why Jesus so often taught and related to people by telling stories and asking questions. His desire was not just to engage their intellects but to capture their hearts.

Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our heart every moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We’ve heard it in our favorite music, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of a sunset. The romance is even present in times of great suffering. Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable deep longing within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for a sense of being truly alive. And this deep desire is the most indispensable thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. And the voice that calls to us in this place is none other than the voice of God. And for this invitation of God to a life of beauty, intimacy, and adventure that we thought was lost and finally found we responded in faith, in hope, and in love and begun the journey we call the Christian life. Each day seemed a new adventure, a new beginning as we rediscovered the world with God by our side.

But for most of us, the waves of first love ebbed away in the whirlwind of Christian service and activity, and we begun to lose the Romance. Our faith began to feel more like a series of a problem that needed to be solved or principles that had to be mastered before we could finally enter into the abundant life promised us by Christ. We moved our spiritual life into the outer world of activity, and internally we drifted. We embraced the world of busyness as a way of fixing it trying to cover the wrongness we sensed. We tried the latest spiritual fad, or simply redouble our commitment to make faith work. Still, we found ourselves weary, jaded, or bored. Until at one point in our spiritual pilgrimage, we stopped to ask ourselves this question: “What is it that I am supposed to be doing to live the spiritual life in a way that is both truthful and passionately alive?

What we want to say really is simply “ our hearts are telling us the truth- there is something missing!

II. The Centrality of the Heart

For above all else, the Christian life is a love affair of the heart. It cannot be managed with steps and programs. It cannot be lived primarily as a set of principles or ethics. It cannot be lived exclusively as a moral code leading to righteousness. As Jesus said “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and Love your neighbor as yourself”.” Do this and you will live”.

The truth of the gospel is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or ethics, our passion is crippled, or perverted. Throughout the Old and new testaments, the life of the heart is clearly God’s central life of ritual and observance, God lamented, “These people …honor me with their lips. But their hearts are far from me” (Isa. 29:13).

Our hearts are the key to the Christian life.

The apostle Paul informs us that hardness of the heart is behind all the addictions and evils of the human race (Rom.1:21-25). God perceived by the heart. This is why God tells us in Proverbs 4:23, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” He knows that to lose heart is to lose everything. Sadly, most of us watch the oil in our car carefully than we watch over the life of our heart.

III. The Message of the Arrow

At some point we all faced and experienced to be struck by an arrow- we all felt the pain and the disturbing horror it brings. These arrows come to us whether through a loss we experience as abandonment or some deep violation we feel as abuse, their message is always the same: Kill your heart, divorce it, neglect it, run from it or indulge it with some anesthetic (our various addictions). To say we all face a decision when an arrow pierces us is misleading. Life isn’t like that- the heart cannot be managed in a detached sort of way. If you’ll listen carefully to your life, you may begin to see how it has been shaped by the unique arrows you’ve known and the particular convictions you’ve embraced as a result the arrows also taint and partially direct our spiritual life.

“Becoming a Christian”, however, does not necessarily solve the dilemma of the arrows, as I was soon to realized. It still lodged deep and refused to allow some angry wound inside to heal. Many of our stories of the heart can be of relatable to others, even though the scenes of our outer story shows different. Many would agree, especially the older Christians, if I say that the sense of being part of some bigger story, a purposeful adventure that is the Christian life, begins to drain away again after those first-love years. Instead of a love affair with God, your life begins to feel more like a series of repetitive acts, like reading the same chapter of a book and experiencing the same dilemmas over and over again. Somehow our head and our heart are on separate journeys and neither feels like life.

Eventually this division of head and heart culminates in one of two directions. We either deaden our heart or divide our life into two parts, where our outer story becomes the theater of the should and our inner story the theater of needs, the place where we quench the thirst of our heart with whatever water is available. But whether we choose the former or the latter, and let live with where we could find the “water”: In sexual fantasies, alcohol, being workaholic, gaining more knowledge thru religious seminars- whichever path we choose, heart deadness or heart and head separation- the arrows win and we lose heart.

This is the story of our lives… The haunting of the Romance and the Message of the arrows are so radically different and seem to split our hearts in two. The Romance is full of hope, beauty, and love; the arrows are equally devastating and ugly. The romance promises a life of wholeness thru deep connections with the great heart of God. The arrows deny it telling us,” you are on your own”. The Romance says, “ This world is a benevolent place”. The arrows mock such naiveté, warning us,” Just watch yourself- disaster is a moment away,” The Romance invites us to trust. The Arrows intimidate us into self-reliance…It is as if we have all been “set up” for a loss of heart.

Now reality strikes us again, confusion tears our hearts once more…, which is a truer message? If we try to hang on to the Romance, what are we to do with our wounds and the awful tragedies of life? How can we keep our heart alive in the face of such deadly Arrows? How many loses can our heart take? If we deny the wounds or try to minimize them, we deny a part of our heart. On the other hand, if we try to embrace the Arrows as the final word on life, we despair, which is another way to lose heart. To lose hope has the same effect on our heart as it would be to stop breathing…and again we yearn if only there were someone to help us reconcile our deepest longings with our greatest fears.

IV. The Basic Reality:

Since childhood we already lived in a story. Why story? The deepest convictions in our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of story. Life is a series of dramatic scenes. The pain, the laughter, the emotions, the different situations, and the fact that life are full of webs and tangles; these constitute the drama of the story of the heart. As Eugene Peterson said,” We live in narrative, we live in story. Existence has a story shape to it. We have beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters”. And as Elie Wiesel suggests “God created man because he loves stories”. The biggest part or rather the main theme of this story is the Arrow and the haunting of the Romance.

Life’s story is always divided into two roads-either the arrow or the romance- and we are always trap in a decision, what road will we choose? In my case I have been into lots of decisions but until now I am still a tender footed beginner when it comes to making decisions. I am still trap on what would be a better way. I am still in chains of hurts and frustrations and still in the auspices of my confused emotions.

Today, there is only one thing that is clear to me “My heart is not alone on its journey, I always have a Hero, I always have a redeemer even in the beginning of time”.