Habits of Our Hearts

Week after week we file into a church building where we nestle into our pews and dutifully go about the routines of the faithful. We sing praises to our God, follow the worship leader in responsive readings and then settle back for the Sunday sermon.

If we’re honest, we know we can almost do these things in our sleep. Some of us even do.

We sing creative lyrics of a new era, but so often they seem to lose momentum with the repetitiveness of each passing week. We hear robust proclamations of a reformer’s faith, but they seem so hollow, like faraway footsteps echoing off a cathedral floor. We hear the very words of God, but so often those words simply saunter around in our minds, kicking up nothing but a little intellectual dust.

Occasionally an impassioned imperative finds its way into our heart, but the soil is either so filled with competing loves or so overgrown with worry that seldom is there room for anything eternal to take root in our lives.

We read our Bibles, take notes, fill in the blanks, all the while wondering. Why such glacier growth? Why so little fruit? And why do the same old weeds keep cropping up, year after year?