the heart, the head, repentance.

Ok, here’s my biggest question right now:

When you repent (or are repentant), do you have to “break” in your heart?

Why do I have this question? This guy I’ve been talking to has been saying that, as a Christian, you shouldn’t be living from only your head or only your heart, but both. I really don’t get it. I mean, I know what it means—Pastor Joe says it all the time, “When we become Christians, we don’t just toss out all the common sense and live by our emotions.” But he has been telling me I am living completely out of my head. He is saying my prayers and repentance and everything’s coming straight out of my head.

This is the thing. I don’t know how to do it otherwise. I don’t think I really understand the difference. I learn things with my head, I make decisions with my head, and I realize things with my head. But what comes from the heart?

Maybe revelation… forgiveness… change. All those things are pretty much illogical to the head. Is repentance in the heart or the head? Repentance seems logical, I think. If I’m doing something wrong and my life’s being destroyed my head pretty much… WAIT… no, it doesn’t. I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff before with my head completely aware that my life was being destroyed. It’s my head that tries to go around those things so that I don’t sit down and think about them.

Ok, so I’ve established to myself that true repentance doesn’t come from the head. But how does it come from the heart? When I pray I honestly don’t feel incredible emotion streaming from my limbs to God or anything. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Really, I don’t feel much more emotion (half the time) than talking to a friend and asking them favors. I’ve been very emotional in my prayer life lately because I just don’t understand the way things are supposed to be. But when I pray, I just pray. I don’t cry much; I don’t shake and fall on the floor. Maybe I’m just not in one of those really bad situations that would cause me to do that. I could imagine prayer after attempting suicide—there’d prolly be a lot of crying, shaking, and falling over.

This makes me doubt my faith… or maybe it just makes my HEAD doubt my faith. I’m not doubting CHRISTIANITY, I’m doubting me… maybe I SHOULD doubt me…

People say that repentance doesn’t have to mean an outburst of incredible emotion. I hope they’re right. My pastor even says that. I guess ultimately repentance results as a change and whether or not you cry and fall down doesn’t matter too much.

But is it a change of the heart, the head, or BOTH? Using what I understand, I guess it’s a change of heart. The heart is “the wellspring of life”, so in turn it would change your head, wouldn’t it? That’s what this guy I’m talking to says. I guess I’m getting it now.

When you’re hungry, you look for food. Pretend that hunger comes from the heart (that’s where our spiritual hunger lies after all). Your heart tells your head you’re hungry and your head knows exactly what to do. That’s the problem. Your head is “logical”; it finds “logical” answers. It finds “quick satisfaction” to things. I guess this is precisely why we get revenge so quickly when we’re not focusing on God. So suppose your hungry is satisfied… ALWAYS. From what I understand you can satisfy your heart’s hunger with Christ—the “bread of life”, the “water of life” right? So if there’s no hunger, there’s no searching for food and there’s no control over us by our head and there’s no desire for quick satisfaction.

Problem solved. It’s in the heart. Maybe that question up there isn’t the BIGGEST question, because from writing this all out I think these other questions were bigger. Now that we’ve established repentance lies in the heart, then it obviously causes something to happen inside—a “breakdown”, emotional or not.

But, one thing I DO understand is that I can’t change my heart. So all I need to do is prayerfully (and probably daily if not more often) ask God to change my heart so it will hunger for Him, and ask Him to fulfill the hunger through whatever He has me do.