On the discussion of fear — Do you fear what your heart is carrying?
Being abused my entire childhood left a sense of wonder in me. I wonder all kinds of things. What would it feel like to have been a loved child? What would it have felt like to be covered up, tucked in peacefully, and not disturbed through the night.
Wonder…..it is a good thing.
I also wonder what damage lingers in my heart. Do I hold bitterness? Am I jealous of the one that came from love? Do I envy?
What is in my heart determines the steps of my life. I focus on this a lot. There is this cool scripture where Jesus is talking to the religious people in his time. He didn’t like them much. In Matthew 15, Jesus was speaking to a crowd and said,
“Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.”
Matthew 15: 10
This tells me to constantly check in with what my heart is carrying and not to be as concerned with what goes “into my mouth.”
If that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, let’s see how Jesus explained it:
16 “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. 17 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? 18 But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. 19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20 These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”
matthew 15: 16-20
So, I am right to be concerned with what my heart is carrying. It matters. It alone can change the course of my life.
I see people worry about drugs, smoking, alcohol — all things that go into a body. What if we instead focused on the heart. What is going on in the heart? The question that Jesus would ask.
Now, I ask you again, do you fear what your heart is carrying?
