Heart, a muscle?

Well let me posit something before I begin this blog. I shall posit this idea and then suppose possible outcomes. We know that the heart is a muscle but we don’t treat the metaphorical heart as a muscle at all, we treat the metaphorical heart as if it’s a stone, which is ironic because the idea of the heart is contrasted completely with the way we see the heart. For it is only when we think about the heart, that we understand the fluidity, and the softness people understand to be love. Suppose for a second however that the heart is a muscle, like your calf muscle.

If we were to take a look at the untrained calf muscle, it would not be able to lift 500 lbs. This is simply a fact. Let us imagine the heart in the same way, for just as the untrained calf muscle doesn’t have the capacity to lift 500 lbs, the untrained heart doesn’t have the capacity to love unconditionally. It is an unfortunate side effect to the fallen state that we are in (don’t quote my theology on that, it is kind of shady I know, but it would stand to reason that if we were not in a fallen state we could love unconditionally as the father does, for we would take His example, but for now we have to train our hearts to do so). Just as you train your calf muscle by gradually lifting more and more weight, you can train your heart muscle to love more and more.

So, I myself am a Christian, and I’m not ashamed of it. So I have a love for God in my heart that I cannot compare to a love I have for anything else, and this love is above everything else. However, when I was in high school I got into a relationship with a girl. Now, my heart at this point is very untrained, to try and relate it to the calf muscle I probably could lift about 10 lbs. This isn’t very strong at all, and as a matter of fact I could barely love God and my parents simultaneously because of how untrained my heart is. But all adolescents know this feeling, the first love that they ever have. How even though you get to see them all day you feel an aching in your heart to be away from them for even a moment, every breath feels meaningless and every action feels pointless without them there. Although the individual who is on the inside of this feels the euphoric bliss of this love they don’t realize that it is slowly consuming them, and if they have good friends and family they will be helped to understand what is going on really (thankfully I’m one of the lucky few with a wonderful family and excellent support base of friends, some of which I have to this day).

From the outside this euphoria is an all consuming fire, and because the heart is so untrained you seem to block out everyone else and everything else out of your life. Yet, like all muscles this new found love settles in, and your heart begins to grow, so that you can begin to incorporate all facets of your life once again (your inward, upward, and outward relationships). I think at this point I have labored the analogy enough for you to understand what exactly it is saying, but I want to expand some of the application outward into other facets of life.

The other facets of life is to say that there is life after relationships (dating relationships), and you need to have a spot in your heart for those things too. Now, let me fast forward a couple of years, to the end of the relationship. At this point the muscle known as my heart had grown (quite considerably), not only did I have enough love in my heart for God, friends, family, and a girlfriend, but I was also developing a love for the world that we are in (I’m not talking about a ‘be in the world but not of it’ idea, but the world with the broken heart that God has for the world we are in). There was a lot of heart ache in the mean time, but what it meant was that like any other muscle you have to tear your muscle in order for it to grow and develop strength. But as I was saying, we fast forward to the end of the relationship. The relationship is now over and there is a huge gaping hole in my heart where this relationship which once took up so much space in my heart was now empty. The question is what do we do with that hole? And the simple answer is that whatever we do, we must fill it somehow.

This is where it gets really interesting, because as we grow, and we stretch our heart our heart has to mend. When someone is body building they have two ways that they can work their muscles, and this is the two ways in which the heart can mend and grow. The first one is for bulk. The way this is done is for the body builder to rip and tear the muscle but not properly care for the muscle afterward, the results in a huge muscle but in very little function of that muscle because it is so big, the individual loses all flexibility. This is one of the ways the heart muscle can heal as well. Let us say that this method of healing is to fill that hole with things that don’t matter. I’m not going to say that what we put in that hole is harmful, because there are lots of things that can go in that hole and many of which are good. But the problem with this type of healing is that we fill that void with only one thing, which consumes our life and grows beyond the hole that was originally there, not to mention it doesn’t fill us near as well as we had wanted it to. The second form of muscle growth, is when a body builder properly takes care of the muscle, by stretching it out before and after. This results in a strong muscle without the loss of flexibility and function, this kind of muscle is often deceiving because the person may look strong, but in fact are stronger than they appear to be.

To bring this in terms of the heart we would say that this would be to first seek God’s face about the void in our lives. We would ask him how to fill it and what to fill it with. I’m not going to go so far as many Christians would and tell you that you MUST fill it with Jesus. That runs just as many risks as filling it with anything else. Heresy though it may sound, I mean to say that if you use Jesus to fill the hole then you are trying to force Jesus into the hole that he was never meant to be forced into. When you seek God’s face about what to put in that hole, you are essentially asking God to surround your heart so that everything you do would reflect Jesus, and in doing so you will become a light unto the world you are in, because whatever you do would turn those around you until the creator of heaven and earth.

The thing that I found when I was faced with that hole is two things. I began to look inward, and I filled part of that hole with myself. Narcissistic though it may sound, I did not focus entirely on myself but I took time to figure out who I am, and I realized that is a journey that will never end (but in order to know where I’m going I have to know where I am, and doing that is a matter of learning who I am). The other thing I tried to fill that section up with, is the love that I felt when I began the last relationship. This is my personal blog and so I will tell you personally that I “fell in love” with too many girls. I did it in a way that I would consider noble, but the problem I found was that, none of them panned out. Part of it was that I picked the wrong girls (you need to take time to find out who they are before you jump to the altar, and wedding bells), the second mistake I made was that I didn’t give things enough time (girls are like slow cookers, guys are like microwaves… and even though I don’t like the context under which I first heard that, it is true… give girls time to warm up to you, before you nuke them!), and the third and most importantly, I was using my attraction to girls to fill a void that only God could fill.

Now! The question is “where am I at now?” the answer is simple. I am in love, just like I have been so many times before. And this time I’m pretty sure I’ve learned my lesson (even though I have many, many more to learn), because there is nobody on this earth that I am in love with. The subject of my love and affection is life its self. It isn’t easy to get here, and it has taken a long time. I don’t have a formula for you guys, but I do want to say this. I am in a location physically, spiritually, emotionally, and familially that I am content with. I am growing, and improving, my heart is growing like the muscle it is, but I am giving it time to stretch like I should. I am definitely in love, and I’m in love with lady life. Fellas, it’s a great thing to be here. Ladies, if you can find a man who is in this place, he will be better for you (not to mention the fact that you should attempt to be here too). Last but not least, I’m not saying that my life is perfect, nor am I saying everyone should be like me. What I am saying is this, you should aim to be at peace with God, and have joy, beyond happiness for happiness comes and goes, but joy will remain through it all. Peace and Joy in Jesus name, that is what I’m talking about… get into it!