Love's Yarn

A ball of yarn, a warning against minotaurs, and a fashionable reminder.  Today, we look at the failings of the heart.

Today is the last installment of our series on learning to love God (and our neighbor) with all our heart.  Every time that Jesus mentions the greatest commandment, He begins by telling us to love with our whole heart.  The heart is the seat of our emotions, it is where they reside, it is the part of us that we feel with – from fear to courage to anger to joy to sorrow to discouragement to resentment to gratitude.  If you can feel it, it is your heart that makes that possible.

Starting next week, I’m going to step away from podcasting for a couple of weeks to focus on some other pressing projects, but I’ll be back in April with a brand new series with a focus on learning to love God with all your soul. 

"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"

New episodes drop on Tuesdays.

Transcript

         This is it!  We’ve arrived! Today is the last installment of our series on learning to love God (and our neighbor) with all our heart.  Every time that Jesus mentions the greatest commandment, He begins by telling us to love with our whole heart.  The heart is the seat of our emotions, it is where they reside, it is the part of us that we feel with – from fear to courage to anger to joy to sorrow to discouragement to resentment to gratitude.  If you can feel it, it is your heart that makes that possible.

         Throughout this series we’ve looked at people and events that help us to love with all our heart.  Courage is found when we take heart, humility resides within a softened heart, and joy belongs to the person who can grieve from the heart.  We talked with my friend Kenny Embry about the importance of heartfelt communication and making sure to get to the heart of the matter in our conversations with others.

Hopefully you’ve caught the thread of that your heart is immensely powerful.  Your heart can give you the will to continue when you feel like quitting, and sincerity of heart can lead to a genuine life that is accepted by God and man alike.  Proverbs 4:23 beautifully states the case for watching over your heart when it says that from the heart flow the wellsprings of life.  Guard your heart, use it, and bravely love from the heart even when life overwhelming.

But today, we finish this series with a warning.  Today, we take a look at the failings of the heart.  The heart has a world of strength to it, but it has an awful sense of direction.  Believe me when I say, when it comes to knowing the right thing to do… your heart doesn’t have a clue.  

I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way.

To better understand the heart’s failings, we need to take a detour to the mythical island of Crete.  Detours are fun, right?  Remember, now that we love better we love detours, too.  Head back to Season 1, Episode 4 if you need a refresher on the beauty of the detour.

I say the ‘mythical’ island of Crete because there is a difference between the Crete of mythology and the Crete of reality.  To the ancient Greeks there were two worlds… the real world that we live in, but also the world of Greek mythology that contains mystical creatures, fantastic tales, and wild lore.  Though we know these stories to be fables, the mythology of Greece has shaped a lot of our language and culture even today.  So, today, we take a tour of a story of ancient Greek mythology – the story of Theseus, a minotaur, and the solution to a labyrinthine maze.

As the mythology goes, Crete was ruled by King Minos who housed a terrifying beast, the minotaur, half-bull, half-man within a giant maze, a labyrinth.  The maze protected the people from the minotaur, but also served as a means of feeding the minotaur its favorite snack – people.  Annually, King Minos leveraged a tax upon the vassal kingdoms surrounding Crete to feed his minotaur.

As the story goes, Theseus, son of aking Aegea, the one the Aegean sea is named after, volunteered to be one of the tributes so that he might enter the maze, vanquish the minotaur, and stop the sacrifices.  He eventually did exactly that, he killed the minotaur and then found his way out of the labyrinth by the means of a very simple trick.  A ball of yarn, given to him by king Mino’s daughter of all people.  As he entered the maze, he unwound the yarn and after defeating the bloodthirsty minotaur, Theseus simply followed the yarn back to the entrance.

That ball of yarn is the origin of a very common, very important word for today’s episode.  The word is ‘clue’.  In Old English, the word for a ball of yarn is a clew – spelled C-L-E-W.  Over time, that ball of yarn became synonymous with anything that points the way toward escape or victory.

I like the way that Webster’s defines the word clue.  ‘Something that guides through an intricate procedure or maze of difficulties’ specifically ‘a piece of evidence that leads one toward the solution of a problem.’  I think you can see how that word for a ball of yarn eventually became what we nowadays call a clue.  A clue is the thing that gives you direction when you are lost in a problem.

Life has lots and lots of problems that feel like a maze that has to be navigated.  Relationship mazes that can feel like dead ends or rollercoasters, whether those be romantic, familial, or friendships – relationship mazes can be complex and confusing.

Or financial and career mazes where we try and balance economics with a desire to pursue goals that go beyond chasing a dollar.  Do you take that paycut to pursue the dream job with that nonprofit? The need for dual incomes versus the value of having mom being able to stay home. 

Or navigating the maze of personal identity? How many candles are on my birthday cake now? What am I doing with my life? Who am I anyway?  What’s my purpose? Where do I belong in this world?

From major life transitions like moving to a new city, starting a family, or negotiating the emotional highs and lows of our human existence … welcome to the labyrinth called life.  How do we make it through this maze? How do we decide when to turn right and when to turn left?  Sometimes, it can feel like we haven’t got a clue.

And unfortunately, a lot of times that’s when we trust our heart… and that’s a mistake because our heart is really a horrible mapmaker.  The heart isn’t a ball of yarn to follow… it’s more of a tangled emotional knot – especially when we feel overwhelmed, lost, or upset.  Our hearts need direction, they aren’t meant to give it.

Of all the books in the Bible, none seems to talk about the dangers of letting the heart steer the ship more than the book of Jeremiah.  Dozens of times Jeremiah warns against the dangers of following the heart and letting the pride, stubbornness, fears, or desires of the heart become the decision maker.

Probably the clearest verse on the subject is Jeremiah 17:9 where he says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Your heart isn’t the north star, don’t set your compass by it.  In fact, if we compare the heart to navigating by the stars, your heart is the opposite of the north star – it doesn’t remain fixed and trustworthy.  Instead, we would be better off to think of our heart as a wandering star – it changes all the time and if you trust it to guide you, you will end up either adrift or run aground.

And this idea that our heart hasn’t got a clue what the right thing to do shouldn’t surprise us.  We’ve all experienced days where we woke up grumpy for no good reason or allowed our emotions to run amok and so we said or did something we shouldn’t have.  In our excitement we make a rash decision or in our discouragement, we miss an opportunity.

Probably the clearest example of this is anger.  When we are angry, our hearts are hot, and we can make really foolish decisions.  Consider these proverbs about the dangers of angry decision-making.

Proverbs 15:18 “A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention.”
 
 

Proverbs 29:11 “Fools give full vent to their rage, but the wise bring calm in the end.”

Or Proverbs 14:17 which simply says, “A man of quick temper acts foolishly…”

Angry hearts are CLEARLY bad clues to guide us when we are trying to pilot our way through life, but anger isn’t the only one.  Think of the bad decisions we make when we feel lonely so we look for love in the wrong places or feel tired so we procrastinate when we should be working or we feel scared so we miss our chance and sin by failing to do the thing we know we should.  Our hearts can be powerful motivators, but they are wandering stars that make for bad navigational decisions in the labyrinth of life.

The problem is that the heart, and the emotions, are often screaming at us to listen to them when we need to make tough decisions.  If life is a maze to be driven through, then emotions like rage, terror, loneliness, resentment, and a host of other major feels are like a screaming passenger yelling at you while you are trying to make decisions. It is easy to forget that we shouldn’t let our feelings drive the future when they are right in our face raising our blood pressure or whispering worries into our ear.

And if you know emotions can make you forget your compass, than your Creator knows that can happen, too.  So what clues does God give us when we are lost in the maze?

If you want the answer to that, you need to go back to looking at that ball of yarn… but this time we are going to turn that yarn into tassels.

For those of us less fashion-aware, tassels are little bundles of thread or yarn tied into a knot and used as decoration on clothing or home furnishings.  Those decorative pillows your wife bought might have tassels hanging off of them.  Or that dangly thing hanging off the end of a graduation cap – that’s a tassel, too.  Tassels have no functional purpose.  Tassels are ornamental.  And in the Old Testament, God used tassels as ornamental reminders to His people to not follow their hearts.

If you dive into the book of Numbers, God gave the Israelites a wardrobe reminder.

Starting at Numbers 15:37:

The LORD also spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and that they shall put on the tassel of each corner a cord of blue. "It shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the LORD, so as to do them and not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you played the harlot, so that you may remember to do all My commandments and be holy to your God. "I am the LORD your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the LORD your God." (Numbers 15:37-41)

It's an odd little detail in the Old Testament.  The Pharisees of Jesus’ day would later use this command to make large blue tassels and borders on their garments so that everyone else could see how religious and pious they were… but that was a corruption of the original intent.  The original purpose was for the tassels to remind the wearer not to follow their heart, but instead to follow their God.

If you want to love better, you can’t follow your heart.  Which is so completely counter-culture.  The heart is arguably the most cherished idol of the 21st century.  We are told to follow our heart even if it destroys marriages, ruins friendships, leads to impulsive or risky behavior, hurts others, or ignores rational thinking.

Your heart can be fickle and that means heart-followed decisions will be inconsistent or likely unstable ones.  If your heart is the compass than you won’t remember to love others, you will be too busy loving yourself.  If we want to love better, we need to remember that the heart has its place, but that place isn’t in the lead.

The heart doesn’t always remember things like duty, responsibility, or virtue.  It also can remember wounds too long or fail to seek to forgive.  The heart isn’t always rational, and that’s okay… but its only okay if we remember that.

So, remember to follow the Lord, not your heart.  Remember to make His commandments your compass and ground yourself against the dangers of the wandering star that is your heart.  So what if you don’t feel it, sometimes the essence of love is doing the right thing in the face of emotional adversity.

I know that can be hard to remember when life is full of emotional moments – so, if it helps, give yourself a clue... let the Scriptures be your yarn of escape… and maybe go by yourself a little blue tassel or two as a helpful reminder to Follow Him when your heart feels big feelings.

Learn to love better – learn to use God’s compass.

         Starting next week, I’m going to step away from podcasting for a couple of weeks to focus on some other pressing projects, but I’ll be back in April with a brand new series with a focus on learning to love God with all your soul.  What does that even mean?  To love God with all your soul?  We’ll talk about what the soul is, why it matters, and we will even talk to a soul expert or two.

         Thanks for listening and sharing with others.  Your support means everything.  You have all been so supportive, and the growth of the podcast is completely due to your kind and generous efforts.  Thank you for the kind words of encouragement.  One of my favorite parts of this podcast has been the opportunity to get to know wonderful souls I wouldn’t otherwise had the chance to meet.  So, thank you for being you…

And until next time, “Remember you are loved, so go, love better.”