Follow your heart
Posted 3/01/2012 | By: R W Glenn
Is this really the truest advice you can give to someone: follow your heart? I think not. If I followed my heart wherever it led, I'd be wallowing in a cesspool of my own filth. So would you. Jeremiah 17:9 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?"
What got me thinking about this subject was a story I read from Modesto, CA about a 41 year-old teacher who resigned his job and left his wife and kids to move into an apartment with his 18 year-old student lover. The teacher said, "In making our choice, we've hurt a lot of people. We keep asking ourselves, 'Do we make everyone else happy, or do we follow our hearts?'"
Maybe this is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" taken to an unanticipated (and unholy) place. Or maybe it's cultural relativism come home to roost ("this is true for us"). Or maybe, just maybe, the language of following our hearts is a disguise for our own idolatry - a way of justifying and rationalizing running our own lives. I'm inclined to think it's a combination of all three.
In the Garden, Jesus prayed, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me." That's what his heart wanted. It wanted escape. It wanted not to endure the pain and shame of the cross, the unbearable suffering of experiencing his father's holy wrath. He saw the freight train coming and didn't want it to run him down. But Jesus went further. "Nevertheless," he said, "not my will, but yours be done." In this sense, it was Jesus' will to avoid the cross ("not my will"). Instead of listening to his heart he told it to shut up. This is the way of the Christian faith. Not following our heart's every inclination no matter where it takes us, but allowing our heart to be ruled by something, or better, someone outside it.