Day Two

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

– devoid of the things of the heart: love, joy, peace, comfort.

And it’s not intentional. We don’t choose it. We don’t wake up one day to find the rot of hard-heartedness imperiling our souls. It happens gradually. It happens one hardening layer at a time: one betrayal, one broken promise, one broken heart at a time. In the place of those wounds, scar tissue begins to build – tough, dense and increasingly impenetrable.

Like the armor young David prepared to wear when he faced the giant Goliath, for as protective as a hardened heart may seem, it immobilizes us. It restrains us. It hampers us as our defenses become our downfall. And just like David, the only real alternative we have is to take our armor off, to dare to enter the fray unguarded and unafraid. The only real choice we have is to trust. To trust that, even if our hearts should break once more, God will be faithful to meet us there in the midst of our agony and to heal us. It is that promise, it is that holy commerce that Calvary secures. For it is only the broken and wounded who ever get to experience the God who restores. It is only those brave enough to hurt who are ever truly made whole.