Heart. Bring papers, clipboards, and crayons to color a heart.
Hi everyone! I’m so glad you are here today.
So I want to talk about a word today that shows up all over the bible and it’s something that you and I all have. It’s in here point to chest. What’s inside each of us? Our heart! Right! Our heart.
Hearts are pretty amazing. We usually draw them like this draw a heart but the heart inside of us usually looks like this show the heart coloring picture. That’s sort of similar to this one but it’s a little different. And our heart is part of our body, and it pumps and beats over and over again, helping to send blood all over our body. Blood comes through one side, and then gets pushed out through the other. It takes about 1 minute for blood to start at the heart and go through our arms, lungs, stomach, legs, back, brain, head, neck, and back to the heart. And our heart does this work all the time.
In our first reading today, we’re going to here a guy named Martin Luther use the word “heart.” And he’s going to use that word – heart – to represent something about all of us. Like I said before, our heart is inside each of us. It’s deep inside. And in the bible and in Luther’s writing, the word “heart” is the word used to mean all of us. It’s a stand-in for everything that makes us who we are. Our heart is our identity; it’s who we are; it’s about what we like, what our lives are like, all the thoughts we’ve had, all the decisions we’ve had to make, and all the things that we lived through in our past and what we’re going to experience in the future. When we hear the word ‘heart’ in the bible, our writings are trying to tell us to pay attention to what makes us everything who we are. Because everything that makes us who we are is something that God cares about too.
God cares about everything you’ve experienced in the past and what’s going to happen in the future. God cares about the thoughts you’ve had and the thoughts you’re going to have. God cares about you when you are at church, school, sitting in your car seat, and when you are asleep at night. And God cares so much about who you are, that God helps all of us try and do the right, caring, and loving thing. And God does this by giving us a bible we can read, giving us a church where we hear God’s story, a church community where we all try to help and support each other, and the ability to pray to God – so that we can tell God what’s on our mind and we can listen to what God wants to tell us.
God cares about your heart. And God does everything God can do to help our heart be kind, loving, and caring to ourselves and everyone else too.
Thank you for being here and I hope you have a blessed week.
Each week, I share a reflection for all children of God. The written manuscript serves as a springboard for what I do. This is from Christ Lutheran Church’s Worship on Third Sunday in Lent, 3/04/2018.