Day 272: What's In Our Hearts

Day 272

Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic 

A series of daily reflections for people of faith

by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor

Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland

pastorrobert@paxpres.org

Week Thirty-nine    Friday 11 December 2020

What’s in Our Hearts

A Crisis Reveals What’s in Our Hearts

“In this past year of change, my mind and heart have overflowed with people. People I think of and pray for, and sometimes cry with, people with names and faces, people who died without saying goodbye to those they loved, families in difficulty, even going hungry, because there is no work.... These are moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had our own ‘stoppage,’ or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal. As in the COVID-19 lockdown, those moments generate a tension, a crisis that reveals what’s in our hearts. In every personal ‘Covid,’ so to speak, in every ‘stoppage,’ what is revealed is what needs to change…” - Pope Francis, extracted from a recent book and published in a current major newspaper.

When we pray with the Psalmist, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” Psalm 51:10, the Hebrew word translated “create” is the same root word used for God’s acts of creation in Genesis chapter one: in other words, we aren’t asking God to renovate or rearrange our existing heart, but rather to create something new that isn’t currently there. When we pray with the Psalmist “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” Psalm 139:23-24, we are asking him to show us the contents of our hearts, the Hebrew “search” meaning to investigate, examine, to see through. In other words, to leave no stone unturned.

When Covid-19 is viewed as a template for our larger lives, we can see parallels that enable us to look into our hearts in ways we have not before, the pressure and stress of the pandemic exerting a subtle unrelenting pressure on our hearts, surfacing what is within. Crises do indeed reveal what’s in our hearts, and even if we don’t like what we see, it is an act of God’s grace that we are given such insight into ourselves so that with Him we can seek needed change.

Reflective question: Do you want to know the full contents of your heart? If so, ask Him.

Reflective Scripture: Proverbs 4:23 – “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

Reflective hymn:

“O For a Heart to Praise My God” – Charles Wesley (1707-1788)

O for a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free;

A heart that’s sprinkled with the blood so freely shed for me.

A humble, lowly, contrite heart, believing, true, and clean,

Which neither life nor death can part, from Him that dwells within.