One bumper sticker piece of advice I hear bantered about is to follow your heart. Which I assume means follow my whims, my desires, my wants wherever they lead. Fulfill myself and I’ll achieve happiness.

But the scriptures rebuff this sentiment. Jeremiah wrote: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?

So…what do I follow? My heart that I know so well, representing my deepest desires and hopes, that apparently carries a seed of duplicity unknown even to me? Or maybe there’s another way?

A few lines before Jeremiah indeed laid out a heart cure: Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

My heart is prone to wander. After all these years of life I know that for sure. I counter the deceit, the straying off after the frivolous, by anchoring my heart in the Lord and sending down roots.

Jeremiah 17 in reading the Bible in 2023

Photo by Zach Reiner