Pay Attention to Your Heart--Your Whole Life Depends on it.
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. - Proverbs 4:23 I grew up in a culture that often dismissed matters of the heart. Perhaps this was a reaction to the emotionalism of the 1960s and 1970s, where decision-making was often based on the philosophy of "do what feels good or right." The Church, in turn, distanced itself from anything deemed "touchy-feely," Counseling and psychological insights were often dismissed as "worldly" or unnecessary. Faith, it was said, should be enough—if you truly trusted God, you wouldn’t need counseling. You would be spiritual enough to suppress emotion. Or perhaps this mindset stemmed from a misinterpretation of Jeremiah 17:9 , which states, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Many took this to mean that feelings were inherently evil rather than understanding the context: Jeremiah was warning against the idolatrous hearts of Judah, not condemning emotion...