Softening our Hearts

Audio By Carbonatix

Our team at Winning At Home gathers for staff devotions ever Monday morning. And in a recent gathering, we read a beautiful prayer and there was one line that really stood out to me. In it we asked God to “soften our hearts toward one another,” and it struck me that this is such a needed change in our world. It feels like most of our systems are set up to help us harden our hearts against anybody who doesn’t belong to our group. In other words, if somebody doesn’t say the right thing or think the right thing or agree to the right thing, then we are tempted to label them as outsiders. And that means we shouldn’t trust them or have deep connection with them. 

But the truth is that we would all benefit from a softening of our heart toward others. Softer hearts show up in small ways: we don’t get so angry when we are cut off in traffic, we don’t throw out that quick insult in response to what somebody says or does to us, we don’t assume that we can read other people’s intent when something goes wrong or feels off, we don’t begin the conversation with the built-in assumption that we’re 100% right and anybody who sees things another way is 100% wrong. Now, all of these things take work, and they all require us to be willing to sacrifice more than we may prefer. But I think we would all agree that we want to live in a world where people treat each other more along these lines, right? 

We can’t change other people, but we can start by working on ourselves. And our beginning point may be just echoing the words of the prayer I mentioned. We can start by asking God to soften our hearts toward one another. That might feel like a tiny step that isn’t going to do very much, but it’s anything but that! By asking God to help us learn a new way of being in the world, we’re doing two things. First, we’re asking God to be at work and to change us, which is a vital part of any healing or redemptive process. And, secondly, we’re creating a goal and a path for ourselves. Just about anything we accomplish in life starts out with us setting out to do it in the first place. Very few hard things are accomplished by accident, so this intentionality is significant. 

By asking God to help and by making this a goal for ourselves, we’ll start to notice the times throughout our day when our hearts are hard. We’ll see the moments when we aren’t open to others or when we’re rigidly focused on our own goals or opinions. We’ll catch ourselves shutting others out or cutting them off because of minor slights or mistakes. We’ll notice our impulses to react harshly instead of gently. 

The truth is that making our way in the world is already hard enough. Let’s not make things harder for ourselves or for the people around us by moving through life with a hard heart. Let’s let God work on us to soften our hearts and to offer that gentleness to the people around us. When we do that, we’ll be winning more often at home!