83 - Keeping Heart: Love's Demand (Part 2)
The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at chip@chipdodd.com. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at bryan@vothcenter.com.
Keeping Heart, by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections; each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.
Visit chipdodd.com to download a free resource of the “Feelings/Needs Chart.” It integrates the essentials of The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart that lead to the experience of the Gifts of the Heart.
On page 23 of Keeping Heart, there is a sentence that shows the dark side of avoiding love’s requirements:
“Avoiding love’s demand, though, requires that we hide our hearts, and, therefore, remove ourselves from living this life.”
Contact is not connection
We experience a vast array of what we call “connections” through all forms of technology that has given us the internet and its multiple forms of social media that offers the illusion of “connection.” We call it “interconnected.”
However, it does not actually give what it says. We are “inter-contacted,” not actually connected.
There are multiple forms of contact, but we still remain disconnected from each other, and even ourselves.
Sadly, loneliness and relational isolation are two of the most talked about forms of misery in our society today, even though we have more pervasive contact than ever before in the history of humanity.
When Caesar connected the Roman Empire with roads, it led to people groups being connected—for better or worse. The technology of today is not a road to connect us. It is the technology that actually keeps us from “facing each other,” which is where genuine connection begins.
Contact is like watching a movie. In a movie, we experience life vicariously, which means “not really in it.” Even more, if we watch it alone, we experience life vicariously in isolation. We do not share a lived experience in reality
True connection is a shared experience in reality.
Contact does not feed the heart. Connection feeds the heart.
Connection requires that a person shares the experiences of their emotional and spiritual lives with another who is capable of doing the same.
Can technology be used to connect us? Yes. If we bring our true selves to the “screen” with another who is “not hidden” behind a “screen,” we can connect. It isn’t the best, but it is close to it. In person is best.
Connection requires that we are truthful about our feelings and needs with others who can do the same. A friend “cuts your sorrows in half, and doubles your joys.”
Connection feeds the heart.
We can have multiple daily experiences of contact and not be connected. Unless our hearts are known, we live in loneliness and isolation.
Neuroscience confirms that human beings find fulfillment through connection, leading us to live fully, love deeply, and lead well a life worth sharing.
Fifty years of pain can begin to be healed in “fifty” minutes.
Episode #83 contains a significant story about reconciliation between a father and son who had contact but no connection. It highlights the results of what can happen when willing people tell the truth to each other—no matter how many years of loneliness and isolation have separated them.
Love is work.
Work means the ability to bring your hands, your head, and especially your heart to the mission of living fully and loving deeply.
Love requires work—the unrelenting, unending continuous willingness to bring your whole self to what matters and who matters.
The work of love is the willingness and painful process of not living behind walls.
We are created to live fully through relationship. We are created to be “pushed” by loneliness to live in relationship with our own true selves, with others, and God. It takes work.
We are relational creatures, created to find fulfillment; relational, connected living is the only way to find fulfillment. Relationship takes significant work investment.
God is relational and offers connection with us.
In Genesis 3:9, God comes into the Garden of Eden and asks his people, “Where are you?” The Hebrew word for, “Where are you?” is ayeka. This word is a word that laments loss of connection. God seeks to hear from the heart of His people. Ayeka is not only a lament of loss, and an invitation of connection, or reconnection in this case; it is an offer that says, “Come back to me, so you can live how you are created to live,” which is in relationship with your Creator.
Ayeka is also a question we ask anyone we love.
Not only is ayeka an invitation from God to us. It is a request of anyone who is disconnected by “walls” of resistance.
Parents know the lament of ayeka when their child’s heart becomes unknown or un-revealed.
It is the question a marital partner has of the spouse when one of them becomes detached from the other.
It is the painful question of a friend when the other person withholds their sorrows and joy.
Loneliness is not our enemy.
Loneliness is what speaks to how we are created to live in relationship. Its pain is part of life, and it calls to us to move into relationship that genuinely connects us. Without this connection, we live in isolation.
Contact will never fill the void of how we are created to live.
Jesus calls us out of our unnecessary loneliness.
“Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Matthew 11:28-29 (NIV)
The same God who called to us in Eden, calls to us now, to live fully, love deeply, and lead well based upon how we are created—to live connected. Love requires that we answer the question and accept the invitation—ayeka—“Where are you?”
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center