Quarantine your heart

Today I understood what "guard your heart" means (Proverbs 4:23). Not having given it much thought in the past, I had blithely assumed the injunction had to do with protecting oneself from exposure to certain airborne temptations --- as in a quarantine, or some kind of spiritual chastity belt.

I once asked a friend with a biblical counseling degree what's the most important thing she learned. She didn't miss a beat: "The heart is active, not passive." She explained that though things are done to us --- even horrible things --- ours is always the choice of how to respond to those. The person I become is never the product of the external influences upon me but of my interaction with them.

This morning I was upset about a sin I have been caught in. It wasn't too long before I noticed what my heart was doing with that unpleasantness: I was like a cornered animal, darting this way and that for an escape --- covering it with a veneer of godliness.

The heart is a carefully calibrated instrument. To calibrate is "to standardize by determining the deviation from a standard so as to ascertain the proper correction factors; to adjust precisely for a particular function" (Merriam-Webster's). The "standard" is the holiness of God. The tendency is to "deviation." The "correction factors" are all the words of God.

The antidote to the place I'm stuck in is prayer: it's hard to deceive myself when I'm praying. I don't generally lie to myself in prayer.