Inept Heart-operator

I feel empty, confused, hurt, frustrated. I want to love in a way that can be accepted and felt but I seem to be almost totally blocked. I must be incredibly selfish by the subtle messages I see mirrored in those close to me. I am very inept at operating the vehicle called my heart. I either stall out and don't move or careen around crashing into others causing emotional havoc and liability.

I have so much fear of pain and not being understood or accepted that I spend most of my time and emotional energy in image management. But simply knowing about this enormous fear does not disable it. It is much bigger than I am.

The Hardening From Resistance

There is a spiritual principle that I just learned about while reading a book. It makes a great deal of sense and fits very well with all the other principles I have been discovering over the past few years. It is also very frightening for I see its effects far too much in my own life. It has to do with resistance, a concept that has been the key for helping me understand the truth about hell.

But this new principle has opened my mind to another dimension of this issue. It even ties in to a dream I had a couple months ago and gives me new insight on that.

Imagine yourself maybe in a group of people, maybe enjoying yourself in animated conversation, or maybe more like myself you may be a little apart from the group just observing what others are doing and busy with your own thoughts.

Suddenly someone comes along and seizes you by the hand and tries to move you to another group while urging and pleading with you to, say, join a game that is about to start. Now for this illustration to work, you are really not nearly so interested in this new opportunity you are being urged to join as you are in what you are presently doing. There could be any number of reasons for not wanting to leave like fear, lack of interest, intensity of relationships etc. But you are very insistent on not leaving as much as the other person is insistent on trying to drag you to the next room.

Now here is the point of all this scenario as strange as it may sound at first. When someone is physically trying to pull you in a direction you do not want to go, you are required to use a number of various muscles to resist that pulling force on your body. Now we are well aware that when you use muscles they tend to be strengthened. Let's say that the above scenario happens on a very regular basis. Your friend tries to pull you and you are holding back.

After a few days of this insistent activity those muscles used for resisting would begin to get stronger and harder. At the same time the other muscles that you are not using that you could use to to actually go with that person are beginning to weaken from lack of use.

In parallel to this, your emotional muscles just happen to be experiencing the very same affects, but not as physically obvious. As you repeatedly practice resistance you r emotional habits become deeper and deeper ingrained. And all of the unused emotional “muscles” over time begin to atrophy and become enfeebled.

But I noticed something about this situation that easily crosses the boundaries between physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions of our lives. When certain muscles are used very much they become harder and harder. We may become very unbalanced because we focus so much on certain ones and ignore many others completely. This can happen in our spirit and mind just as easily if not more so than with our body. I wonder if the result of this process is the heart of stone that is talked about in Ezekiel 36?

When we are drawn and pulled by the beauty and truth about God and we cling to our old familiar beliefs and traditions that we are comfortable with, we have to exercise emotional and spiritual resistance to counteract that drawing power. We may assemble proof texts and compile enormous quantities of quotations to buttress our positions. But in the end we may be appalled to discover we were only turning our hearts into petrified stones that had only the appearance of a functional heart. The greater the revelation of glory, the more resistance is required to maintain our position. We may very sincerely believe we are “standing strong” in defense of “the truth”, but in actuality we are standing in resistance to growing into a deeper knowledge of God. In Jesus' comments about judgment day, God does argue or deny the claims of those who insist they have performed everything correctly. He simply states, “I never knew you”. (Matt. 7:21-23)

Sadly and ironically, it seems that the most effective tool that hardens a heart is religion itself. Religion has caused more havoc on this earth than anything else. Religion is used to justify wars, promote bigotry and prejudice, and repress emotional expression thereby causing untold damage and confusion. I am just beginning to see some of the damage in my own life and my family from years of emotional avoidance and self-deception. Much of it was conditioned by the atmosphere of my childhood but that has continued to deepen and harden throughout most of my life.

I am realizing now that my inability to receive and give love has shaped most of my personality and history. I have very seldom even allowed myself to acknowledge many of my emotions, much less share them with anyone else without fear or blame. But practicing this is one of the essential ingredients for living in reality and I am just now discovering I have hardly ever done it. In fact, I have noticed many times that now when I do try to share my real emotions with someone else that most of the physical muscles in my body will begin to harden, tense up and eventually lock up. The longer it continues I will begin to tremble and if I still continue to share occasionally it even becomes difficult to breath. I am beginning to wonder if this is an outward manifestation of a possible inward heart of stone.

What is frightening about this principle of hardening by resistance is that I see myself practicing it much of the time. It is a major part of my personality and my perceived identity. It is how I shield and protect myself, but it is also what isolates and quarantines me away from connecting with other hearts. In the end it will disqualify me for participation in the body of Christ if I am not freed from this mode of thinking.

The good news is also in Ezekiel 36. God says He will exchange my stone-hardened heart for one of flesh. As I understand it, a flesh heart is movable, soft and flexible. Flesh can experience feelings and a heart can be honest about emotions. A unique feature of real hearts is that they have the ability to literally synchronize themselves to another heart when they come into close proximity. And as I understand it, God has great plans to do just that very thing in ways I've never dreamed of.

Pain, Fear, Heart

Salvation is not about avoiding pain but is about learning to suffer well. I realize I have a great deal to learn about that. But just because my reactions are often inappropriate to fostering openness does not reflect the true intentions of my heart. I am struggling with a lifetime of ineffective and self-defeating behaviors and habits that continue to sabotage most, if not all of my relationships. I really am committed to change, but that is as difficult for me as I suspect it may be for others. I want to fight for the real hearts of those around me. I want to learn how to draw out their true identity that God placed in their hearts as a unique treasure to bless others. God placed them in my life for this very purpose. I realize that one of the most important roles of a good friend is to have real relationships. Salvation from God is primarily focused on restoring all of us to function once again as we were originally designed to be in all our relationships. We are learning what it looks like to live from our true heart instead of being controlled and strangled by our past. Heart to heart relationships are what we crave the deepest. Having our heart listened to and appreciated and cherished is the only real solution to our deep feelings of dissatisfaction. We spend most of our time trying very hard to arrange various areas of our lives like possessions, personal looks, friends etc. to quench this deep hunger. We have all developed our unique habits of avoiding and masking the pain of the emptiness we feel deep inside. We come to believe it is our goal to get rid of the pain, but we have been deceived into “medicating” the symptoms instead of facing the real causes. We understand this sometimes theoretically, but it is very difficult to engage our hearts in the process because we are so influenced by fear. I appreciate the continued desire and attempts of some to connect with me even when they are very frustrated and sometimes it hurts so much. I am beginning to see their true heart and its desires and I feel the same way. I am finding that the things I am most insistent that other people should change are often my own weaknesses. I want to develop a much more open and heart-intimate relationship with people, especially my family. My heart craves this intensely – sometimes screams for it. But when it passes through some of the negative filters I still have, by the time it is heard by others it is often perceived as almost the opposite message as what my true desire is. This is terribly frustrating not only to those closest to me but to me as well. This is the reason that I write so much at this point in my life. I have found that I can bypass many of my self-defeating and distorting filters that scramble the intended messages. Apparently many of those filters are somehow connected to my voice, my tones, my body language etc. Even when I try to read out loud what I have written the filters of fear and shame kick in and my body ruins and sabotages my heart messages once again. Most of the time I feel like I am trapped inside a prison of my own body and expressions. I am just starting to make timid attempts to escape from the prison and begin to experience the “terrifying” world of openness with other hearts. So far I have not been able to connect very deeply, but I do not want to turn back to live in my familiar prison the rest of my life, even though that seems often more comfortable. I have been cheated out of joy for too many years – I am determined to find freedom even though I have to go through pain to get there. I hope you will continue to join me in my escape attempt. Many times I am overwhelmed with fear or shame and run back to the perceived safety of my prison. But then I realize how confining it is here and I want to get out again. This appears very confusing at times and inconsistent to those observing me. They are right. But if they think I can be free just by simply deciding to, I would like them to demonstrate that for me from their own prison and maybe I could learn to follow their example. This may sound like a lot of theory and blather, but I am trying to share some of my deeper feelings and frustrations simply so you can understand me a little better than my inept attempts in the past have done. I know I shouldn’t be, but the real fact still exists that deep inside I am still often motivated by fear of rejection and avoidance of shame. I do all sorts of maneuvering to avoid feeling rejected, but then end up isolating my real heart from being seen and known. Please be patient with my very clumsy attempts at learning how to be real, how to be a friend, how to be a real heart-friend.

Problems with the Unholy Trinity

In past history the concept of kingship has been taken to its extreme and shown to be very undesirable – people in extreme power use and abuse other people destructively. The solution offered to counter the problems produced by kingship was the supremacy of law. The Magna Carta demanded obedience from kings as well as others. We are now beginning to see the faultiness of the supreme system of law in the use and abuses perpetrated today. Relationships are meaningless compared to a legalistic observance of law. Arbitrary application of selections of millions of laws is used to subject others to the advantage of those in power. It is the abuses of kingship all over again except the power is diversified into many lawmakers and enforcers instead of a single person. This is even more effective to subvert any resistance for there is almost no one that can be held accountable. The system complexes itself to avoid accountability and has the appearance of virtue. It is so effective and attractive that it permeates both secular and religious thinking.

The reason the pope still resists this type of thinking is because he still craves the absolute power of kingship centered in himself and works to wrest control from lawmakers back into his religious dictatorship.

The third part of this unholy trinity, economy, is the lubricant and motivation for both of the other systems. All of todays laws in our legal system when examined carefully and understood correctly are based solely on economics and greed. Law and economics have developed a symbiotic relationship. We have deified the rule of law and politicians as well as religious people praise it publicly as their god. We scorn and attack cultures and countries that are so “backward” as to adhere to the old kingship model, either by corrupt dictators or religious dictators. We are fighting a war in Iraq to supposedly impose the supremacy of law above the rule of religion and corrupt politicians because we insist that our system (god) is superior to their system (god).

Judgment used to take place in the court of kings, either directly or vicariously. The will of the king or his representatives were the law. This became too subjective and unpredictable so laws came more and more into power. Finally law itself was elevated above kings and the world believed it had found the final solution to problems (sin). Democracy is the great experiment of the worship of law and for many years appeared to be highly successful. But as the evilness of men migrated more and more into the system, lawmaking has become more and more a tool of suppression and division. Morality has declined and religious people still cling to the notion that the solution lies in the system of law. They believe that every evil can be solved by just more rules and they believe that God operates by the same method. It is a strong addiction to an illusion that is fatally flawed at its roots.

All of these systems of the unholy trinity of economics, kingship and law are the counterfeit of God's true system rooted in the family model based on relationships and operated in love and the imparting of life. The counterfeits are based on fear, force and various applications of death. They are ultimately based on Satan's unholy trinity of motives – to steal, kill and destroy, though often masked in robes of righteousness. Jesus came to reestablish the model of heaven – to give life and to increase the imparting of life. He came to destroy the works of the Devil and fee the captives and reinstitute the operation of the relational family system.

Jesus pointed us forward to the final day of resolution when all of the counterfeit systems will be exposed and abolished (1 Cor. 15:24). Men will assume that they can defend themselves and retain life by appealing to the observance of law (Matt. 7:21-23). They assume they can justify themselves by argument of performance like we have always been taught to do in our false systems. However, they discover they are not really in a court of law as they are accustomed to thinking, or even a court of a king who can be manipulated as they have previously been. They are in the presence of a Father who is the essence of reality itself which they have used all their false systems to avoid since the beginning of sin. Arguments, falsehood and all the force of the false trinity are seen in the light of perfect reality to be just a sham, an alternative reality that was simply a fiction all along. Externalism had attempted to replace internal integrity, force had tried to replace joyful submission, economics had tried to replace love, kingship had tried to replace family relationships, and law had tried to imitate the indwelling presence of God Himself in all His creatures.

In that final day of revelation it will be seen that the cross of Jesus was not an achievement, it was a revelation of what God is on the inside.

The Umbilical Cord

When I was in my mother's body I used her blood and nervous system which conditioned and trained me how to think, react and perceive reality. Her emotions became my emotions, her feelings my feelings, her fears and joys mine.

To be born again I need an umbilical cord to God to use His blood and nervous system. I need to have a vital connection with Him/Her so intimate that God's feelings, passions and impulses are reflected and expressed in me.