Day Two // February 27 // Hard-Heartedness “What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hardheartedness?” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. –
It is an almost guaranteed certainty: when couples come into my office for premarital counseling, the inventory we have them fill out reveals that each feels the other to be too stubborn. And when I ask them about it, they both smile and nod and agree. There is a certain charming whimsy to the hard-headedness of our humanity, a certain universality to our dogged determination (within reason, of course). Hard-headedness is one thing. But hard-heartedness is another. The ill-tempered uncle of apathy, hard-heartedness takes un-feeling to a different, more crippling level. It distances us. It ensnares us. Hard-heartedness relegates us to a proxy life of mere existence and not real living
