Follow Your Heart, and Other Sketchy Advice

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Don’t trust your gut.

That idea caught my attention last week when I watched a TV interview with Adam Grant, an author, researcher, and professor at the Wharton School.

His new book is all about, as the interviewer put it, challenging people who say, I’ve got it all figured out. Who say, Oh, I’ve got great instincts. Or who intone, Follow your heart!

He says we should Think Again, which is the title of his book.

Think again, Grant says. Consider what you don’t know. Think about how you could learn something. Be open to reconsidering your opinions and convictions.

Thinking along those lines could be a great way to enter into Lent.

There’s a practical benefit to thinking again, Grant says. Rethinking things makes us better positioned for success at our jobs, our relationships, and all of life. And while he rightly argues for curiosity in everyday decisions (“I need,” he said, “to listen to ideas that make me think hard, not just the opinions that make me feel good.”), I’m wondering if we could go even bigger than that.

How could Lent be a time for me to enter prayerfully into a season of open-handed reflection? This season leading up to Easter, traditionally practiced as a time for penitence and making amends, also helps us challenge some of our too-quickly-arrived at conclusions. It can make us wonder, think more deeply, and ask bigger questions. Questions like:

  • Is the measure of a full life found in having a comfortable salary or ample bank account--living in affluence?

  • Is the goal of life is to have people say nice things about me?

  • Are the privileges I enjoy mine by right?

  • Are the cutting comments I made to put someone in place just fine, and in fact, in my rights to say? Did they “have it coming”?

You can see how we might need to think again. What else might we need to reconsider? Trusting our gut can get us into trouble. No wonder Jeremiah the prophet said ominously,

The heart is deceitful above all things

and beyond cure.

Who can understand it?

Our instincts can rob us of the truth. I get how sometimes we consider and reconsider when we might just need to do what something deep inside is trying to tell us. But following our heart can lead us terribly astray.

This season we enter now, the season of Lent, is perhaps the pre-eminent time to reflect on the ways life sometimes asks us to grow and let go of some of our old habits of thought, our hastily arrived-at assumptions.

So we can ask: how can our praying during this season include the admission that we need to submit to God? That we don’t always get it right? That God may be waiting for us to think again, in the very presence of God? What a great span of time to let him inventory our assumptions--weeks where we invite Christ to ask us hard questions about what we base our life on.

Lent is a season in which to live not sure that all we have concluded about life is best and right and beyond any revision. Why settle for stale customs and tired conclusions when we can pray for truth we haven’t seen, insight we might really need, and a depth in prayer we haven’t experienced?

Tim Jones