All of us want to know how to have a Happy Heart. We all want to live carefree and joyful every day. But it is not as easy to do as it is to say it. Today we are going to talk about how to help us all have a happier heart and how it can affect every relationship we have.
** Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. ** Proverbs 4:23
Several of our recent posts have been about Loving One Another and Marriage Help. But, any conversation regarding any kind of relationship can help us become the kind of people that honor God with all of our personal interactions. Jesus Christ interacted with people all the time but He was not a married man. Yet, He gave marriage advice, because He understood people. He understood the principles behind any healthy relationship and lived those principles every day.
So, I hope my single readers will stay with us and glean from these posts’ ideas on how they can improve their communication and interaction with all those that they love and care about: may it be children, grandchildren, friends, co-workers or neighbors.
Proverbs 4:23 talks about our human heart. Not the one that we can see or that can be operated on by a surgeon or treated with blood pressure medicine, but the heart that holds our feelings, our opinions, and our principles. In any relationship, we need to keep a firm hold on our heart and know what condition it is in. Allowing our sentimental heart to do as it pleases will likely cause some complications for us. A regular examination of how our heart is feeling will help us to treat any problems and improve its health.
For example, let’s think about our relationship with money. We need to be sure that we do not fall in love with money! Money is a useful and beneficial tool but it is not the source of our security. Nor is it what will fill our heart with joy. Joy and security come from our relationship with the Lord. So, it is wise for anyone to keep a clear idea of how much of our heart we can devote to accumulating money.
How about our friendships? What kind of heart should we have when it comes to having friends?
Proverbs 17 tells us that a friend loves at all times. Does that mean that friends are more important to us than our spouse or our children and that we should spend all of our time with them? Probably not. Friends enrich our lives and we can enjoy a healthy, balanced relationship with them. We can be good friends and have good friends without trusting in those friendships more than we trust in the Lord. When we are going through a difficult time, having good friends at our side is a great comfort, but our heart should be running to the Lord first for help and then enjoy the comfort that He sends through the love of our friends second.
So, both money and friends are two ways that we can examine how our hearts are doing. Do we have these two relationships on healthy footing?
When we talk about our other relationships, like marriage, we can also examine how we are protecting our hearts from wandering away from the commitment we made to our spouse to love them “til death do us part.”
Proverbs 31 tells us that **The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. ** We are all told to keep our own hearts with all diligence in Proverbs 4, and this verse tells us that we are also responsible for the heart of the other person in our marriage also. The Key to a Happy Heart is both keeping an eye on our own heart and its priorities, feelings and thoughts, but it is also being the guardian of our spouse’s heart and of all those that we love.
Understanding these two nuggets of wisdom can transform our marriage and any other important relationship we have! Let’s make it more personal and put it in the first person.
“I am responsible for what I put into my own heart. I need to know if my thoughts and feelings towards my spouse are the same loving, kind and praiseworthy thoughts and feelings that I had on the day that I married him/her. Or, have I allowed myself to become critical over unimportant little things or have I allowed my mindset to become one of ‘who cares what he/she needs, I am all about what I need first!”
We can change the words ‘marriage and spouse’ to friend, parent, sibling, neighbor, etc. and do the same self-examination of our hearts and our relationships.
We are all 100% responsible for our own heart’s health. In the same way that we are responsible for how we are taking care of our physical heart by what we eat, drink and do every day, we are equally responsible for what we put into our emotional heart.
We are also responsible for what we put into the hearts of our friends and spouses. Our words, actions, habits, priorities and emotional response to life all affect our relationships. We are known by all of these. Our very names are attached to synonyms like:
Critical, complaining, demeaning, lazy, obsessive compulsive, too busy, unavailable, work-obsessed
-or-
joyful, encouraging, uplifting, edifying, responsible, productive, caring, sharing, helping, loving, affectionate, tender, caressing, open-minded, peaceful, faithful, loyal, honest, noble, valuable, understanding, easy to talk to, a good listener, fun to be with, respectful, honoring, committed, a keeper of promises…..
Both of these lists describe two different hearts. One in need of radical surgery and one that is healthy and will last a long and honorable life.
The Key to a Happy Heart? Fill it with healthy food. Fill it with healthy thoughts, emotions, and priorities. And be responsible for not only the state of our own hearts but for the hearts of those that we love.