Questions of the Heart

June 20, 2007 by Rev. Sean McMillan.

We all know people who moved to far away cities in search of a better life—only to discover that the life they found was a lot like the one they left because greatness is an inside job. And no matter where you go, you can’t get away from yourself. If you were a mess in Chicago the odds are you will be mess in New York. Changing your address won’t make your life any better until you change your mind. Real change happens in the heart. And long before you will ever be able to change your life you must be about the business of transforming your thinking one thought at a time.

In fact, if you really want to change your house—change your heart, because the house is always a reflection of the heart. We reproduce how we feel about ourselves in almost everything we do. Our homes, our relationships, our jobs, our finances, and even our spiritual lives tell the hidden story of what we think about ourselves when nobody is looking. In spite of the public displays that we make there lives within us a secret conversation that we have about ourselves, and the results of this conversation can be devastating if the words are full of fear and insecurity.   The great struggle in life is to protect your heart against all the things that come to make you small and people who don’t know how to protect their hearts don’t know how to protect their homes, theirs jobs, their money, or their families; because whenever you lose yourself everything connected to you is lost in the process.

Each of us must be about the work of renewing our lives as we learn how to live from the heart and not from our fears. The Greek word for renew is Anakainosis, and it literally means to grow up. By this measure, the process of renewing your life is connected to the things that make you mature, and anything that makes you bigger, no matter how much it hurts, is ultimately good for you because sometimes before you can grow you have to cry. And it is often the case that the price we pay for clarity is misery, but if in the end we become bigger people then consider your tears an investment into your future. The real question is not: what happened to make you small? The real question is, rather, what do you hope for? The heart is ultimately renewed by what it hopes for. This is a call for you to be bigger even if your situation isn’t necessarily getting any better. Today we celebrate imagination and all the people who know how to protect who they are by believing in what they can be. No more makeovers—its time for a metamorphosis. 

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