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How’s your heart? Is this something you have to struggle with too? And you enter a new season of life wiser, but very much fully alive. When you pick away at the callous, something wonderful God created still beats underneath. When you feel your heart becoming hard, you need to take action and fight against it.Īll that said, I’ve also discovered this: if you work at it, your heart can stay supple. A hardened heart isn’t inevitable, but it does take intentional effort to guard against one. You accept a harder heart as a new normal.
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Your job as a leader is to spot the hope in any situation anyway, to find a way when it looks like there’s no way. If you keep that up, it can be all you focus on. Because life has its disappointments, and people are still people even after they become Christians (it’s amazing how that happens), it’s easy to focus on personal and organization shortcomings. You stop looking for what’s good in people and situations. It’s easy to stop trusting, stop loving, stop believing. It’s easy to shield yourself from people. You trusted someone and your trust was misplaced. Your hopes were bigger than what happened. When I become fixated on the patterns, not the people beneath them, my heart grows hard. Unchecked, that can lead to cynicism when you realize the people who say they want to change (and at first you believe them), don’t change. Actually, people behave in certain predictable ways. Then I realized people behaved certain ways. In my first few years in ministry, all I saw were people. Even when you meet someone, you’re thinking about what’s going to go wrong, not what’s going to go right. You no longer believe the best about people. From your personal friendships to your family to work, the feeling’s gone.Ĥ. So much of what’s supposed to be meaningful feels mechanical. Well, you might on the outside, but in reality you don’t feel it.Ģ. You don’t really celebrate and you don’t really cry. What are some early warning signs of a hard heart?ġ.
#Jesus keep me near the cross daune full#
But if I don’t monitor things carefully, I can move into full seasons where I don’t feel much of anything at all. Like a physician who sees illness or tragedy every day, you develop a way of dealing with the pain. (Maybe it’s a natural by-product of life…but I’ve done my adult life in ministry, so I’m not the best diagnoser beyond that.) But I do.Īt times I think it’s an almost natural by-product of ministry. So it’s a little bit vulnerable to admit you struggle with it. Hardness of heart is a condition that people on the other side of God develop. That’s a polite way of saying that the longer I’m in leadership, the more I have to guard against my heart becoming hard. I don’t know about you, but as for me, the longer I serve in leadership the more intentional I have to be at keeping my heart open and fully alive.