"Harden not your hearts as your fathers did in the wilderness." Psalm 94
What makes a hard heart? It's a question I have been asking myself for a week. A better question, as always, would be why? Why harden your heart? Is it a choice or is it something that grows slowly? Becoming accustomed to the slowly warming water until, before you realize it, it's boiling and a hard shell forms.
After my week of reflection (more thought time to follow) I believe the root of a hardened heart is fear coupled withe experience. We all know and have experienced the heartaches of life, some are more traumatic than others. For the most part, we get wise and approach things differently the next time around. What if the next time around, the answer is to close up? What if we allow fear to change how we live our life, trying desperately to guard our own hearts without real thought to coming hardness.
While a hardening heart, I believe is a gradual change, some people show it more than others. Those jaded and synical, whose judgmental eye is just another form of hardness, those we can see clearly. We all know someone like this. But what of those who hide a hardness of heart just below the surface? Friendships easily made and kept, but only to a persicope depth, where you can keep a visual on the surface. When things become serious or deep, fear kicks in and somehow the hidden hardness finds an outlet, petty fights, lack of empathy, self-afflicted affectations. Sounds familiar even in my own life. Fear of a pain long remembered and a wound not yet healed.
The question then becomes, what do we do with pain? I'm very aware that I have wounds still healing, and fear of pain and rejection runs through my soul from time to time. What is the proper response to pain? Very often, my gaze pauses before the cross, the only place where suffereing can come to light. All of our experiences of pain or affliction, though caused through human weakness, were still seen and destined by Christ. These moments of seeming failure and despair are in fact moments of victory over death.
Can we muster up the strength to live through the pain? Find hope in things unseen, and the fertile knowledge that true love casts out fear and heals wounds. The truest love is found in the heart of Christ as He cried "I thirst" from the cross. To have a hardened heart implies a choice, a choice to live in fear or to live as children of light, confident that the Father's Will shall lead us to life everlasting. If we take moments of pain as an opportunity to truly live, then life will engender life and those around us will see and feel its life-giving effects.
