“You are a hard man, John Weston! In fact, I do not think you have a heart at all!”
I was hearing these words at the end of another broken relationship. Susan and I had been living together for about 6 months and had known each other for about nine.
All had started out wonderful, as usual, meeting at a party where everyone was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. We seemed to be kindred spirits. Both of us liked to party. Neither of us wanted to be tied to another person by some piece of paper, like a marriage certificate. After all, hadn’t the marriages we both been through failed miserably. Why subject such a beautiful thing as a relationship to a burden neither of us could bear.
After a couple of months of ‘dating.’ Which entailed meeting at a bar and drinking until we were both to drunk to really communicate. We would fall into bed in alcohol and drug inflated passion. It was all very impersonal, yet we each thought of it as love. But by the time we decided to move in together, cracks in the relationship we already showing.
On top of my other addictions, I was and still am a workaholic. Working long hours. Keeping myself sustained during those hours with stimulants to keep me going and booze to keep from getting too high. Most nights I would arrive back at the house we were sharing too tired to care about Susan’s day much less talk to her about it.
She too was spending time working at her job as a silk screen printer and then hitting the bar for several drinks after work. As we became more and more distant, she would spend nights out, never coming home. The inevitable arguments began after about 4 months. She is blaming me for never being there and even when I was being too gone to talk. I am blaming her for staying out all night and partying with whomever she pleased. We were a mess.
Then came the evening when it all blew up. She is telling me that I was heartless and I doing my best to hurt her as much as she was hurting me. Two people in pain. Two people so absorbed in their addictions and their selves. It could only end in absolute desolation, and it did.
I was thinking of that night just recently. My granddaughter was visiting from Oregon. She arrived with her recently born daughter, my great-grandbaby and with her loving and devoted husband. Everything about them exuded patience, love, and open communication. So much the opposite of my life under the influence of my addictions and before I accepted Jesus as my Savior. I spent a lot of time on the verge of tears that day and in tears the next missing them. What I realized once again is that my heart has changed!
No, I did not have the old one surgically removed. Nor have I really changed in personality that much. The only way I can explain it is that I have been, through grace been given the heart of God.
There is a promise in God’s Word that I love and like to claim. It can be found in the book of Ezekiel,
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:26
I have experienced this transformation! It wasn’t immediate. But the more I allow the Holy Spirit to work in my life the more I saw it! Miraculous things, addictions being removed and language which was once so harsh and harmful taken away. By the time God opened a new relationship for me with a loving woman named RuthAnn, I had been shown that it was not my heart any longer, it was the heart of God!
Strangely now it seems so clear. For all those years I had been centered on one thing, me. If there was a problem, it was because someone did not understand me. If there was an argument, it was the other person who had the issue not me. Now it is Jesus who is at the center of it all. I realized it was Jesus who selflessly died for me. It was the Father who“…gave His only begotten Son that I may not die but have life everlasting” This is love, real eternal love offered to even me a sinner. It is this love that changed everything. Once I saw the heart of God it turned mine from stone to a heart of flesh.
Today it pains me so much when I see a world that I once lived in struggling with addictions, pain, and suicide. I see broken marriages and people hurting without knowing why. I thank God I am encouraged when I hold my great grandbaby and share in the love my grandkids have for her and each other. I want to bottle that up and sell it to this hurting world!
No, that kind of love does not mean you nor I will ever experience pain. That is not the promise. But what God does promise is that He will through His Spirit give us the heart of Jesus. We can know true love and in that make it through the pain knowing He is there. His promises are true. All we have to do is turn to Him and believe. That is my prayer for you today. The heart of God is yours, cry out to Him. He is waiting!
Blessings
John
7/29/2021
