Head Change or Heart Change?

It’s always amazing to me how God pieces things together – one conversation ties to another unrelated conversation until the heavens open and you just get it. I want to share the revelation God gave me this morning around relationships.

My husband is a helper – it’s truly a spiritual gift. I’ve never met anyone that would so selflessly drop what he is doing to step in for someone else. He has been injured for about 10 days and couldn’t move well, lift things, sit too long, stand too long – the works – which meant I had to do everything. Like, EVERY thing. We normally have a “you cook, I clean” rule – that was out. Trash is not normally my job – is now. All of the cleaning, which we usually share. Laundry. Running errands. Putting on his socks. The. Works. About 3 days in, Bryant kept trying to do what he knew he shouldn’t, and when I would question him or tell him to lay down, he would tell me that he knew I didn’t want to be doing everything and he felt bad. This crushed my spirit. I didn’t want him to know that (but apparently my face didn’t get the message and it was loud and clear.)

Some days later, this led to a really great conversation about head and heart changes. Sometimes, the heart change doesn’t come first, it follows a head change. Of course I didn’t want to be responsible for everything – it was overwhelming at times, or I was tired from a long day, or I just really didn’t like that task. But I did want to serve him and help him when he needed it most, so I made a head change to get it done. No, my heart wasn’t always in it. What he didn’t know was that I spent most of the task praying that God would change my heart so that I could find joy in the service. I trusted that with a little faith from me, God would change my heart; I was committing to walking in it until he did. A little bit, day by day, it was less of a burden and more joyful – it’s a process, but there is progress. In our conversation, I told him I just wanted him to recognize the head change, and maybe have faith with me that God would create a heart change.

In reality, he’ll never know where my heart is so it’s not fair to assume what place I’m in – I was handling things, I was trying to handle them with a joyful spirit, but even if I wasn’t 100% in it with my heart it didn’t mean that I wanted to serve him less. We have to be careful in relationships that we aren’t applying our own feelings to someone else or holding them to an unfair standard that we set. Some of us are breaking life-long habits or behaviors, and maybe their heart isn’t in it 100% – but let’s accept and appreciate the effort and recognize that they’re putting aside their own feelings to do something for you.

On the other side, we have to be careful to check our heart. Was it awesome that my heart wasn’t in serving? No. I’m certainly not proud of it. Is it a fact of life? Sometimes. The key here is that I recognized where my heart was, I didn’t let it hold me back from serving others, and most importantly I submitted that weakness to God. Scripture warns over and over to watch your heart; how you think about yourself and others, how you speak, how you function all stem from what is in our heart.

For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. (Matthew 12:34b)

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. (Proverbs 4:23)

But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. (Matthew 15:18)

My husband would never have any trouble serving me through injury or sickness – he does it daily just because. It was hard for him to understand where I was, and it was easy for him to feel guilty because my heart wasn’t in it. But my heart issue isn’t his issue to fix or compensate for – that was something I needed to recognize and hand over to God, the almighty changer of hearts. My husband’s job was to accept what I could offer and submit the rest to God on my behalf.

I can’t wait for the “you cook, I clean” rule to be back in place…and you know what? Neither can he. He loves serving me in that way. But when I sit down next to him after a long day of handling all the things, and he grabs my hand and tells me how much he appreciates me – I can find joy in the things I don’t love, because I love him. Knowing that he knows he’s loved and cared for is the most important thing to me…sacrificing a few dirty dishes is nothing to accomplish that.