How is Your Heart?

Chances are, life isn’t working for you in some way. We try so hard to prove otherwise. It could be that you feel lost in a world void of intimacy. Maybe you struggle with an addiction, or perhaps your son or daughter does. You or your spouse may have engaged in an affair. Or it could be that you are a pastor with the pressure to have it all figured out. Regardless of your circumstances, you are tired of trying. Your journey to recovery starts with story. Your story. And a bigger story.

Story is the language of the heart, and we will not live well from our heart until we can tell its story.

Whole-hearted. Fully alive. Free. Once upon a time we knew our heart would experience life this way. But somewhere in our past things became muddled. Dreams eroded into nothing more than childish fantasies. Hope became a thorn in our flesh. Innocence regressed to a literary term instead of our experience. Life evolved into “getting by” rather than a heroic story.

Ache, pain, and loneliness moved in. The enemy, we thought. But what if heartache could become our trustworthy, truth-telling friend? What if we walked away from the comfort of resignation, resentment, and numbness and offered our ear once more to the voice of hope? Listen closely to the ache of desire, the sting of pain, and the despair of loneliness, and you may just hear their whisper as invitation: There is more.

There is more. The call toward deeper intimacy and fuller life is a journey inward.

Sure our story includes external characters, an external plot, and external conflict. But our heart is the setting of our story. It is where tragedy struck, needs went unmet, and feelings were invalidated. But the story also includes what we’ve done with our heart in response. We created new strategies- attempts to deaden the pain in efforts to survive. Worse still, we decided that we could depend on no one but ourselves. We learned to live separate from God and others. And as we hide alone and isolated, the secret stories that reside within our heart weigh unbearably heavy. This life of self-preservation leaves us lonely and captive. We were made to be known and live free.

Life hurts, and hard as we try, we cannot rearrange the plot to quench our soul’s insatiable thirst. But what if we became equipped to know our own story so that we could engage an unpredictable and messy world with greater confidence, hope, and the trust that all is grace?

Come get your heart back and live a better story.