[Industrialblog,
April 21, 2005]
Hardness of Heart
Maybe one reason that some people can't get the Gospel of Christ is that the truth needs a place in the soul to rest. Some souls are so hardened from coarseness and sin that the truth just glances off. They're the rocky ground in the parable. If you decide to shut your feelings down, or shut yourself off from love, or lose yourself in sin, then the word of God has trouble taking root in your heart, like it does in deep, fertile soil.
(By the way, I've always seen myself as one of the other two types — the shallow soil in which the person withers under tribulation or the soil with the weeds (cares of the world) that strangle the word as it grows).
And yet sometimes I wonder whether it's my heart that's hardened, and whether I'm one of those people who can't get the truth. There are two sides of every story, after all. Yet people have said in the past that I try to be honest. I may have some character flaws, but I don't think an unwillingness to face up to the truth (eventually) is one of them.
But I'm wondering ... more than wondering, ruminating about something in the past. Hindsight is 20-20. When you take an approach to something and it doesn't work out, and in retrospect it's really obvious that it would never work, that's not a lie, is it? Even if now you say, "What on earth was I thinking?"
(By the way, I've always seen myself as one of the other two types — the shallow soil in which the person withers under tribulation or the soil with the weeds (cares of the world) that strangle the word as it grows).
And yet sometimes I wonder whether it's my heart that's hardened, and whether I'm one of those people who can't get the truth. There are two sides of every story, after all. Yet people have said in the past that I try to be honest. I may have some character flaws, but I don't think an unwillingness to face up to the truth (eventually) is one of them.
But I'm wondering ... more than wondering, ruminating about something in the past. Hindsight is 20-20. When you take an approach to something and it doesn't work out, and in retrospect it's really obvious that it would never work, that's not a lie, is it? Even if now you say, "What on earth was I thinking?"
I made some horrific mistakes in my life and gotten really depressed about it, but I also grown to believe the price is worth the return on the whole. Big victories require big risks. (Isn't that a central element of faith?) It is the act of living. So ... unharden your heart my friend.
100% true.
The answer to that question depends entirely on what you were thinking.