Heart

    Where does our desire come from? Where do our passions come from? Where do the things that drive us originate? What I'm truly getting at here is what lies at our core. The answer is simple. The heart. They come from our heart. As we see in Proverbs everything we do flows from our heart. It also gives a warning though, a disclaimer prior to this knowledge. Guard your heart. I want to ask a very personal question, in what state is your heart? What does it look like? What fuels you? What have you put our hearts through and how has that shaped your heart? 

    You see here in Proverbs 4:23 in the ESV it says,

“Keep your heart with all vigilance,

for from it flow the springs of life.”

    I want to break this down for a moment and look at some really awesome things. Keep your heart, or your bosom; central or innermost part of something, the core of you, the seat of emotions, regarded as the center of a person's thoughts, the muscle that keeps us alive. Take that and keep it safe. Guard it and do so with vigilance; the action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties, not letting your guard down, not giving the smallest sign of weakness. This is important because out of our hearts flow the springs of life, the heart is where we find the things that motivate us. It is where we find life.

    If our hearts were to stop beating we would die. We all know that, but what you may not know is that when we go through heart break, severe heart break, our brains release chemicals into the heart that actually cause physical pain. That pain creates weakens the muscle structure of our heart and can cause the person to die. It is similar to a heart attack but there is no blockage to be the cause of the pain or death. People die from this every year as there spouses or loved ones die. They have also linked social loss or social rejection to heart break, they cause similar symptoms and can manifest into physical pain just the same. Death from a broken heart is known as "broken heart syndrome" or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

     This is huge! We need to build a huge wall around our hearts then! Don’t let anyone in don’t let anyone close enough to do damage! We have to alienate ourselves from all others so that they cant hurt us by rejecting us or so that we don't fall in-love and experience heart break! This is what we need right!? Wrong. We don't need to fortify our hearts and make them impenetrable, we just need to be smart about who we let in. We need to be smart about what we put our hearts through and we also need to know that having a broken heart maybe fatal, But its always recoverable. They say with Family and support from friends it takes less than 2 weeks to recover. You see we were designed to find a companion and we were created to love one another. Sin perverted that and caused us to hurt one another and cause the heart to be attacked. Sin entered in and brought with it pain and death. 
    I want to go back to that question I asked before, what state is your heart in? The reason I ask this is because through the course of life things come in and darken and damage our heart. Sometimes instead of healing and cleaning our heart we just withdraw from reality, life, friends and family until the pain becomes numb. We then go about our normal lives hiding our hearts kind of like this cartoon strip. The words are from C.S. Lewis and drives the point home.

    Ultimately though if we want to find joy and happiness again we need to be vulnerable. We need to take our hearts out and let them be healed. God is the best medicine you will ever find and is the perfect person to bring healing. The hard thing though is we still have to take our hearts out of the box to let Him heal us. God wants us to be out showing love and living a life full of risk but we should also be careful on what risk we put our hearts through. So what does your heart look like? Does it need to be cleaned? Does it need to be fixed up?

Much Love

The Bear