Sara J. Mikkelson
Are you more likely to turn to your brain or your heart when you are facing a problem or making an important decision? As a “geeky girl” I’ve experimented a little with balancing the heart and the head and have discovered that there is a vast depth to this topic. Like the Bible says, the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, so we can’t totally trust our hearts. The brain is imperfect with limited knowledge; it makes mistakes and forgets important things. Proverbs 3 instructs us not to depend on our own understanding. Neither our brains nor our hearts are completely reliable. And a combination of the two doesn’t necessarily cut it either.
What we need is a fixed external reference point or we will be caught up in chaos. If you sit in a chair and spin around, it looks like the walls around you are moving, but you are really the one who’s moving and the walls are still. Then someone walks into the room while you’re spinning in your chair (because that person wonders why you’re doing such a random, silly thing) and you really get confused because the person and the walls are both moving, but in different ways. If you continue in this confusion for too long, you will end up falling over from dizziness.
What is your reference point? You are moving and changing over time, as am I and every other person. We can’t completely trust anything inside of any person. God – the Creator of the universe – is the only true, reliable Reference Point we can trust, because He never changes. We can count on God and His Word, even if the entire world crumbles beneath us.
“Before the mountains were born, or Thou didst give birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.” ~ Psalm 90:2
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yes and forever” Hebrews 13:8
With our Creator as our reference point, we don’t have to worry about conflicts between the head and the heart, because it is God who gets the final Word in everything. We don’t have to choose between the truth our heads need and the compassionate love our hearts yearn for. We are instructed to speak the truth in love. Love is not a feeling, but an attitude of humble selflessness (see 1 Corinthians 13). It means following what is best for the other person, even if it’s painful. I’m so very grateful that God chose to be the example of that love for us – He did not choose between the truth of justice (the head) and the grace of forgiveness (the heart), but instead chose to love us by sacrificing His own life, fulfilling the needs of both the head and the heart.
Have you chosen to love Him back and lay down your life to life for Him? Are you choosing, every day, to continue in that truth-speaking love to those around you?
Here’s a song to listen to as you think about this:
