Tuesday's Trust - Discernment of Hearts

Tuesday's Trust

Discernment of Hearts

Has anyone noticed as you go through this severe grief involved in Child-Loss that you have developed a keener discernment of people's hearts? It's almost as if God gives us that "sixth sense" to see right inside a black heart with an almost x-ray vision when it presents itself. In giving us this ability to very quickly discern what people are showing us about who they really are, God is enabling us to self-protect the very broken heart that resides within us. 

When Jesus talked to the religious people who were doing many "good" things but whose hearts were as dark as the Queen of Spades, He did not tread lightly. In my father's King James Bible, I was reading again today of how Jesus spoke to such folks. Instead of His typical kind, loving, compassionate heart that He showed the sinners caught in sin, for example, we see His very harsh treatment for the judgmental, hypocritical, pious, but unloving hearts that many of the religious teachers and leaders of His day exhibited. His words to them in the King James Version is "Woe unto you..." over and over for their harsh, unloving actions toward those Jesus so loved. Of these dark hearts, Jesus said,

"This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from Me."

~Matthew 15:8, KJV

Jesus had such discernment as He looked beyond what people were saying or doing, and looked straight into their heart and called it for what it was. So too it seems He gives us a version of this keen discernment for our own survival. We have been given a clarity of heart in many ways amidst our brokenness and weakness; it's as if a new strength is rising up out of our weakness in that we often are able to see what most people miss. It seems we can no longer brush by the callous treatment of the broken, the wounded, the handicapped, the less fortunate, for we are now firmly in their camp and know what it feels like to be kicked when we are down. All of a sudden we see such hard-hearted callousness for what it is and will not stand for it. As Tommy said tonight,

"I may have lost my child, but I can see people's hearts."

Things that are important to so many in our circles today are just not important to us anymore. And we often feel like we stick out like a sore thumb because we just will not put up with it any longer. We cannot afford to. We are already about as broken as we can be; we cannot tolerate a person with a vile agenda "piling on" their meanness and unnecessary abuse to our already broken hearts. And it seems to us, our loving God gives us the eyes to see, the wise actions to take, and the words to say when we see it coming. 

Black hearts beware; our hearts may be broken, but they are not blind.

Picture, thanks to 123rf.com