A few weeks ago, Jake woke up before me. It was a Saturday morning, and I was fully prepared to relax. Coffee in hand, puzzle at my kitchen table, kids watching Bluey.
Jake had a different plan in mind. That plan was cleaning the house. Counters, dishes, breakfast, laundry. He started before I even got out of bed.
After lazing downstairs still in my pajamas, I made some comment about how he clearly woke up ready to work. He agreed, saying he noticed the house was dirty and wanted to clean it up. (Yep, that was the whole exchange.) What’s funny though is I heard a lot more underneath it: You’re not doing enough. You should have spent your time differently this week. The stuff you did do doesn’t matter. You don’t deserve to rest right now.
Of course, I didn’t ask if that’s what he meant. My brain simply decided it was.
I’ve been thinking since then about how fast that happens, how quickly a heart can go from open to closed, and how little actual evidence it takes.
There’s a scene in John 7 where a crowd is arguing about who Jesus is. Some think he might be the one they’ve been waiting for. Others shut it down immediately: he’s from Galilee, and Scripture says the Messiah comes from Bethlehem. Case closed. But funny enough, they had access to the same words, the same miracles, the same Jesus standing in front of them as everyone else did. They just weren’t willing to find out if what they’d already decided was actually true.
My church was teaching on this passage and the pastor said this: a hardened heart knows everything it needs to know. Yikes. A hardened heart doesn’t look for more information. It doesn’t give the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t pause to consider an alternate perspective. Why? Because it needs no further conclusion.
I’m sure you can connect the dots here. I wrongly made some assumptions with Jake that just weren’t true. I didn’t stop to ask what he meant-–I assumed I knew. My brain picked the version of the story where I was being criticized, and I let it hold. And, listen, there have been times in the past where maybe that would have been true. But I can’t just jump to conclusions based on unsubstantiated judgment.
This is part of what makes marriage so refining. You know someone so well that you stop asking and start assuming you already know what they meant, what they think, what’s underneath their words. The people in Galilee thought they knew where the Messiah was supposed to come from. I thought I knew what Jake meant by one sentence about a dirty kitchen.
So – back to the story. An hour after that short exchange, Jake approached me and asked if I was upset. (I have no poker face.) I told him I just felt unappreciated, and like he thinks I’m not doing enough. Amazingly, he hugged me, apologized, and said that’s not where his heart was at all. He told me he just genuinely wanted to help out because I’d been home for a week with the kids who were on an intermission from summer camp.
Hardened heart = immediately softened.
Instead of matching my closed door with one of his own, Jake offered me the benefit of the doubt when, meanwhile, I didn’t offer it to him.
How backwards that is. We tend to withhold the benefit of the doubt most from the people we’re closest to, as if closeness earns us the right to stop being curious. But nearness should make us more careful with each other’s hearts, not less. The more someone matters, the more it costs to misread them.
Not shockingly… This applies to our relationship with Jesus, too. He has far more reason than Jake did to write me off, to decide who I am based on my worst, most critical hour. And yet… He doesn’t. He keeps meeting me in grace and love even when my heart is hardened.
We really can’t earn that. It’s just offered, over and over.
This week, I’m working on asking instead of assuming. Join me if you want. Let’s not set our conclusions in concrete; rather, let’s hold them loosely enough to let the truth catch up.
My guess is God would rather have a soft heart that gets it wrong than a hard one that gets it right.
In Progress, Alyssa 💛
