Follow your heart.... not

At LCC where i was just teaching, there was a class for first year students called LIFE group. basically it was to practice English writing while writing about less formal topics. One them that i read over and over in my life group journals was "you just have to follow your heart, and then you'll be happy :) "

Reading this statement always brought a strong reaction- the kind you get when you see an overly sappy commercial, or hear a Miss America candidate say "I am going to bring about world peace, can't we all just get along?".... this statement is so thrown around in our culture that people don't realize it has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, nor any power to give any meaning to one life...

You see the heart is often our worst enemy. "Following your heart" most often means do whatever i want to do, regardless of the consequences to others or myself, and no reason to feel guilty- my heart made me do it. Jeremiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceiptful above all other things- who can trust it?". The heart, the metaphorical seat of our emotional passions and desires gets us into trouble more often than not. I find myself often engaged in a war against my heart, which more than any other part of my self (mind, body, spirit) seems determined to draw me away from Gd's life-giving plan for me, and his fullness of life.

When we follow our heart, pastors run away with their secretaries, people cheat on each other, people sleep with each other before they are committed, people buy huge things they don't need, people seek revenge, people hold grudges, people lash out, people become emotionally dependent or enmeshed, people kill steal and murder, people view themselves as better than others, people envy and judge.

Gd has given us the power to NOT follow our heart, which leads us down a dangerous road. He has given us a mind that warns us that our heart is unreliable, and a spirit which holds us back from making the dangerous leaps that the heart would demand from us.

And even happiness itself is ephemeral at best- happiness is conditional, a pure cocktail of chemicals, something that evaporates as soon as the conditions which induced those chemicals change. So many people seek happiness as an end. When truly happiness should be seen as the occasional side effect of joy. Give me X'n Joy anyday over happiness. Joy is something that is unconditional, that is experienced equally at a funeral as at a wedding, in prison as in freedom, joy can meet and incorporate sadness, grief, confusion, frustration, and come out on top. Joy is the unchanging hope that we have in a Gd who is beyond us, the Great Author of our Story, who has a plan to grow us and make us more like Him and will never abandon us.

I wan't to conclude with some sweet lyrics from my all-time hero, Don Chaffer of Waterdeep

I believe the heart's a theatre

And that the actors on its stage

Are playing dreams, but they're impostors

and the devil pays their wage...

I believe the passions of that drama

that we're certain is for real

is a diversion for our senses

while the director(Satan) comes to steal

Ever since i was a little kid i didn't want to run away

But it scared me half to death to think that I might have to stay

I've had a hundred scarecrow certainties

built a wooden drawbridge for my brain

But it all comes down, when i see your(Js') face against the windowpane