The Lost Life of the Heart
Thirsty Hearts are those whose longings have
been wakened by the touch of God within them
A. W. Tozer
Some years into our spiritual journey, after
the waves of anticipation that mark the beginning of any pilgrimage have begun
to ebb into life’s middle years of service and busyness, a voice speaks to us
in the midst of all we are doing. There is something missing in all of this, it
suggests. There is something more.
The voice often comes in the middle of the
night or the early hours of morning, when our hearts are most unedited and
vulnerable. At first, we mistake the source of this voice and assume it is just
our imagination. We fluff up our pillow, roll over, and go back to sleep. Days,
weeks, even months go by and the voice speaks to us again: Aren’t you thirsty? Listen to your heart. There is something
missing.
We listen and we are aware of….a sigh. And
under the sigh is something dangerous, something that feels adulterous and
disloyal to the religion we are serving. We sense a passion deep within that
threatens a total disregard for the program we are living; it feels reckless,
wild. Unsettled, we turn and walk quickly away, like a woman who feels more
than she wants to when her eyes meet those of a man not her husband.
We tell ourselves that this small, passionate
voice is an intruder who has gained entry because we have not been diligent
enough in practicing our religion. Our pastor seems to agree with this
assessment and exhorts us from the pulpit to be more faithful. We try to
silence the voice with outward activity, redoubling our efforts at Christian
service. We join a small group and read a book on establish a more effective
prayer life. We train to be part of a Church evangelism team. We tell ourselves
that the malaise of spirit we feel even as we step up our religious activity is
a sign of spiritual immaturity and we scold our heart for its lack of fervor.
Sometime later, the voice in our heart dares to
speak to us again, more insistently this time. Listen to me---there is something
missing in all this. You long to be in a love affair, and adventure You were
made for something more. You know it.
When the young prophet Samuel heard the voice
of God calling to him in the night, he had the counsel from his priestly
mentor, Eli, to tell him how to respond. Even so, it took them three times to
realize it was God calling. Rather than ignoring the voice, or rebuking it,
Samuel finally listened.
In our modern, pragmatic world we often have no
such mentor, so we do not understand it is God speaking to us in our heart.
Having so long been out of touch with our deepest longing, we fail to recognize
the voice and the One who is calling to us through it. Frustrated by our heart’s
continuing sabotage of a dutiful Christian life, some of us silence the voice
by locking our heart away in the attic, feeding it only the bread and water of
duty and obligation until it is almost dead, the voice now small and weak. But,
sometimes in the night, when our defenses are down, we still hear it call to
us, oh so faintly---a distant whisper. Come morning, the new day’s activities
scream for our attention, the sound of the cry is gone, and we congratulate
ourselves on finally overcoming the flesh.
Others of us agree to give our heart a life on
the side if it will only leave us alone and not rock the boat. We try to lose
ourselves in our work, or “get a hobby” (either of which soon begin to feel
like an addiction); we have an affair or develop a colorful fantasy life fed by
dime-store romances or pornography. We learn to enjoy the juicy intrigues and
secrets of gossip. We make sure to maintain enough distance between ourselves and
others, and even between ourselves and our own heart, to keep hidden the
practical agnosticism we are living now that our inner life has been divorced
from our outer life. Having thus appeased our heart, we nonetheless are forced
to give up our spiritual journey because our heart will no longer come with us.
It is bound up in the little indulgences we feed it to keep it at bay.
This post is from the book of Brent Curtis &
John Eldredge
I love reading John Eldredge because unlike
many writers, where you get very few nuggets here and there when you read them.
With John, you find that, his writings
show that he has a great spiritual life with an awesome love affair in His
heart with His first love and redeemer.
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