Aligning the Story of Your HeartPrøve

Heart Logic is established very early in life. It can be revised, but your initial conclusions are often written deep in your heart, making them hard to rewrite. All people ask these four Heart Logic questions: 1\. God: Is God good? Is He really good all the time? 2\. Yourself: Am I good even though I’m flawed? Am I truly valued and worthy of love? 3\. Other people: Are other people good? Is there goodness among the brokenness in humanity? 4\. The world: Is life good? Is life good even in the most difficult times? Essentially, your heart wants to know if goodness exists. It wants to know if you’re secure enough to trust. And it wants to know if it’s secure enough to have hope. If your heart takes a deep breath and rests in trust and hope, its confidence becomes the fuel of faith. The cumulative effect? The degree to which you can understand goodness in the midst of darkness and pain determines your capacity for emotional and spiritual wellness. We’ll cover this progression in detail later in this chapter. Sore Spots are inextricably linked to faulty Heart Logic Questions: Our pain causes us to give the wrong answers to the questions. But the healing of Sore Spots paves the way to draw very different conclusions—positive ones—to the questions. Each “yes” you give to a Heart Logic question helps you develop critical factors that become your pathway across your gap: security, trust, hope, and faith. As we’ve seen, the human heart wants to avoid pain at all costs. One of the ways Christians avoid it is by giving quick, affirmative answers to the Heart Logic Questions. We might say, “Oh, yes, God is good!” But it’s what we’ve always said, and the statement isn’t born out in our level of trust and love for God. Or we might say, “I’m good,” to hide our shame. We might say, “Yes, people are good,” because admitting someone is unkind and untrustworthy would force us to have some hard conversations. And we easily pronounce, “Life is good,” though we’re on the edge of burnout and full of anxiety. The “yeses” we give to the Heart Logic Questions can’t be superficial or rote; they must be genuine. Fear keeps us from honesty, but we have a God who knows the worst about us and loves us still. We can trust Him