Why consider your Heart?

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Your Heart is really important to consider. If you don’t consider it, you won’t see God, and you won’t flourish.

In Matthew 5 we find one of the most famous subversions of human attitudes ever articulated. 2000 years on, most people in the west will know at least one or two of the Beatitudes. Jesus plainly states that those who are blessed aren’t the popular or wealthy, but those who have experienced suffering yet pursue God. Blessed are the pure in heart!

It is obvious how important a pure heart is to Jesus. It is a part of a blessed life. It is this purity of our Hearts that enables us to “see” God. Can we afford to let the purity or impurity go unchecked? If you fail to check your Heart you may disable your ability to ‘see’ God. That is the spiritual cost for failing to keep your Heart in Mind.

If you do not keep your Heart in Mind, you will remain unaware of whether your psychological needs are getting met. That being the case, you may not be nourished and because you are not nourished, you will not prosper. This is the most obvious cost that will come to you if you neglect what is on your Heart. You may enter into a flat or anhedonic space, where you do not feel overly valued or vital. You will place yourself at risk of not getting what you need, and you will fail to get a sense of who you are as an individual because you have disconnected yourself from those needs. To state the obvious, you will be “disheartened”. The modern way of saying this, is that you won’t flourish.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. People of faith have been considering their Hearts for thousands of years; “I commune with my heart in the night…” (Ps 77:6).

And this is where I have trouble with my own community and concerns about the future. Many people in my professional community believe that feelings are not to be listened to and interpreted, they are there to be observed and let go of. The prognosis for ignoring the Heart is not good spiritually, nor is it good psychologically as we have discussed. By ignoring our Heart we enter a “meh” wasteland because we leave the Heart unattended. Our identities will become unknown to us. Our Hearts will speak their emotional language but we will not listen….. we may get a detached serenity, but we will live life without a pulse.

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