Show notes
I’ve had a recent prompting and examination of my heart after praying Psalm 139: 23 “Search me, God, and know my heart.” Here’s what I figured out … don’t ask if you’re not willing to respond to God’s findings.
He went to work on bringing to light why I do what I do. Where’s my heart in my choices and actions? Is my heart right about it. Honey, you can be doing the right thing with the wrong heart and it will be wrong. I also believe God’s mercy and grace is so big he can cover the heart that is right but the steps went a little sideways.
Why does God care so much about the heart? Proverbs 4: 23, “Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.”
Think of your heart as a spring of water. If that spring becomes polluted, everything downstream becomes polluted too. If the spring of your heart is polluted, it’s not long until everything else in your life is negatively affected. And of course your enemy knows this well. If he can get your heart out of alignment, soon your desires are twisted. Your passion is twisted. Your pursuits and your motives are all wrong. Then you’re doing things you said you would never do and one day you wake up to realize you’ve become someone you never wanted to be. It began with your heart.
God wants to check our hearts.
So, why do you do what you do? Why do you wear what you wear? Why do you scroll through social media? What is the intent of your heart?
Over the past several weeks, I felt a little ping in my heart about a beautiful daily practice I’ve had for over 15 years.
Daily Gratitude Photos
- Began as an effort to leave a legacy of my life for my young children at the time (I thought I was dying).
- Became an effort to preserve my memories, should I lose them again. FEAR DRIVEN
- Moved to a pure intention to live daily out of gratitude. To slow down, to savor, to be present. This changed my life.
For all those 15+ years, I’ve posted those daily gratitude photos on my personal facebook. 5,509 days, never missed a single one and dated and stored in monthly albums to remember my life and live it in gratitude.
WHAT COULD BE WRONG WITH THAT? Yet I couldn’t ignore the pinging I felt from the Holy Spirit that said something needed to change about what was a beautiful, life changing daily practice. Once I surrendered to that ping, I came to understand God was checking my heart, and that deep examination found that there was a part of my heart that was wrong.
While it was still about living in gratitude and documenting that daily gratitude, it had also become about the show. And let me tell you something, God is not impressed by the show in the slightest. The show had to end.
So, after 5,509 days, on day 5,510 I took that daily gratitude photo with a heart that was 100% set on gratitude, void of the show, and kept it private. Those photo storage albums are just for me now.
If I share a photo now, it has gone through the filter of checking my heart first. I’ve found there aren’t a whole lot of photos that have passed for the time being.
This small act of obedience did something radically awesome for me … it flowed DOWNSTREAM. When the stream of my heart was pure, it cleaned up some other things. My addiction to my phone was almost immediately eliminated. I didn’t need to post everything. I didn’t need to obesess over comments and feedback (there wouldn’t be any). Nor did I have a need to see what everyone else was doing that day.