This business of heart-led living is hard work.
We aren’t designed for isolation; it’s not what God intended for us. We are hard-wired to live in extended family households. Anything else is hardly living. However, revelation says a covenant family is actually better than mere blood kinship. Then He sent His own Son to pull us together into islands of covenant sanity under His blood. There remains an undeniable deep human need for physical contact with people who genuinely love and understand us. The core fact of this sensory heart stuff is that our heart fields are limited to some 15 feet (4.5m), and the whole idea is to harvest the maximum benefit from consciously merging physical fields with each other.
As with all reality, there are levels of isolation. In one sense, there is the isolation of the spirit that only death can heal. Until you have returned to the Lord’s literal Presence, you’ll always feel the bite of isolation on the ultimate level. There are a lot of lower levels of isolation, such as missing human company. Of course, the wrong people can make you long for isolation again, but we remain social creatures by our very nature.
I find that the most difficult isolation is that of faith. In my close proximity here, there is only one person in walking distance who understands my religion and shares the deeper elements of my faith, and I’m married to her. Having worked for decades in the ministry of marriage counseling, I can tell you beyond all doubt that it is an indescribable blessing that my spouse shares my ultimate values. Still, there is no one else in geographic proximity. There are surely folks willing to listen to me talk about it, but none who really understand.
It’s not as if they are inherently dead and unable to get it, nor particularly unwilling. Believe me, I’ve tried to share this thing almost every day. Still, there is a certain amount of territory you have to cross before their minds are receptive and ready to process it. And it’s vast stretches of territory you don’t traverse over a few cups of coffee. It takes a lot of time for the mind to absorb the necessary elements before any of it registers. As you might expect, your average neighbor and acquaintance has too many other things to worry about, and has been conditioned by all the worst kinds of manipulative “evangelism” to avoid anything but the most frivolous chatter.
Indeed, some of them are conditioned to offer their own abusive forms of proselytizing. They have the words “sharing from the heart” but it’s only a figure of speech for them. Their hearts are, at best, asleep. For a lot of mainstream Christians, their hearts are bound and gagged in the damp, dark basements of their souls. Meanwhile, there is fierce competition in proselytizing each other.
Up to now, all of those who share with me an active heart-mind are scattered across the planet. You would think we were dropped here like some invasive species, seeds wafted on the jet-streams until we are everywhere. Yet rarely do any two of us catch sight of each other without the aid of virtual communications.
We know that our hearts enable us to see the very character of our Creator in the fabric of reality itself. We sense that gentle yet insistent call to bring life to the image of His character, to breathe divine justice into everything we touch.
There is no one right answer, but there is a very important question: How do we bring divine justice to the earth? What do your prayers sound like when you address this holy privilege? What relief for our isolation can we hope to find?
