An Undivided Heart

Last Friday I had the joy of recording a conversation with Wm. Paul Young, author of The Shack, the novel that touched millions of readers around the world nearly twenty years ago. At the center of the story is a father named Mack whose young daughter, Missy, has been abducted and murdered. Devastated by grief, Mack receives a mysterious invitation to return to the very shack where she died. It is an unforgettable story of suffering, forgiveness, and healing.

In October, Paul’s newest novel, Return to the Shack, will be released, and he graciously sent me an advance copy before our conversation. Once again, he paints a picture of God that I find deeply compelling—a Love, as he writes, “committed to walking each of us into freedom and wholeness… holiness.”

That word wholeness stayed with me because it seems to echo everything our Scriptures are saying today.

Last Sunday we reflected on Jesus’ image of the seed planted in good soil. We discovered that the goal of the Christian life isn’t simply to believe the right things but to become deeply rooted in God so that good fruit naturally grows. This week the Scriptures continue that same journey, but from a different angle. If last week was about putting down roots, this week is about what grows from those roots: an undivided heart.

Isaiah begins with God’s remarkable declaration: “I am the first and I am the last.” We often hear those words simply as a statement of God’s greatness. They certainly are that. But they are also a statement about reality itself.

God is the Alpha and the Omega, the sacred Reality from which everything comes and toward which everything is moving.

If that is true, then the spiritual life isn’t primarily about becoming more religious. It is about aligning ourselves with Reality itself. It is about planting ourselves more deeply in the life of God until our lives begin to flow with the current of Love that has always been carrying the universe.

That leads naturally to one of my favorite lines in all the Psalms: “Teach me your way, O Lord, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart.” What a beautiful prayer.

An undivided heart has found its true north. It is no longer pulled in opposite directions by fear and trust, resentment and forgiveness, despair and hope.

Perhaps sin is not first about breaking rules. Perhaps it begins with a divided heart.

Isn’t that our experience? Part of us wants to trust God, yet another part still lives in fear. Part of us longs to forgive, while another part clings to old wounds. Part of us knows we belong to God, yet another part still believes we are alone.

The wonderful news of the Gospel is that God is not trying to make us perfect. God is making us whole.

That is exactly where Paul takes us in Romans. Once again he contrasts flesh and Spirit, but not because bodies are bad. Paul is describing two different ways of living. One life is driven by fear, scarcity, ego, and isolation. The other is animated by the Spirit of God. One contracts. The other expands. One divides. The other unites.

Then Paul says something astonishing: “You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption.” Fear divides. Love unites. And the Spirit awakens us to our deepest identity as beloved children of God.

That is why one of my favorite moments in The Shack is when Mack first encounters God—whom he comes to call “Papa.” Before anything else is explained, before any questions are answered, Mack hears these simple words: “I am especially fond of you.”

Can you imagine hearing God say that to you? “I am especially fond of you.” Perhaps that is where every undivided heart begins.

Paul goes on to say that “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Notice what he doesn’t say. Creation is not waiting for people to escape the earth someday. Creation is waiting for humanity to awaken—to remember who we really are. Last week Isaiah pictured the mountains singing and the trees clapping their hands. This week Paul describes creation groaning like a woman in labor, longing to give birth to a humanity that finally lives from Love instead of fear.

Then Jesus tells the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Too often we hear it as a story about good people and bad people. I think it reaches much deeper than that. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once observed that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

How true that is.

Within every one of us grow both wheat and weeds. Love and fear. Compassion and resentment. Courage and shame. God does not reject us because weeds are present. Instead, God patiently cultivates the wheat until it grows stronger than the weeds.

The same is true of every family, every church, and every nation. Every community contains both beauty and brokenness. Recognizing that humbles us. It reminds us that the weeds are never simply “those people over there.”

And perhaps the parable reaches even further. The whole cosmos contains both wheat and weeds. Our universe is breathtakingly beautiful, yet profoundly marked by suffering. Stars are born, and stars explode. Forests flourish, and earthquakes destroy. Children laugh, and people die. Love appears everywhere, but so does cruelty. The wheat and the weeds—the grace and the pain—are woven together into creation’s unfinished story.

Yet God does not abandon the field because weeds exist. Nor does God destroy the field in order to eliminate them. God patiently tends the field until the harvest.

In the end, God’s refining love will burn away everything that is not Love and Truth—within us, within our communities, and ultimately within creation itself.

We spend so much of our lives trying to identify the weeds. Jesus seems far more interested in growing the wheat.

That is where The Shack finally leads. Mack’s healing does not come because every mystery is solved or every wound is erased. It comes because he discovers that Love has never abandoned him. The God who is “especially fond” of him patiently walks him toward freedom, forgiveness, and wholeness.

I think that is exactly what God is doing with every one of us.

The God who is the First and the Last is patiently drawing all creation toward its true home. The God who hears the psalmist’s prayer is giving us undivided hearts. The Spirit is awakening us from fear into the freedom of beloved children. And like a patient gardener, God keeps tending the wheat until Love has the final harvest.

When we plant ourselves in God’s good soil, what grows is an undivided heart. And through hearts made whole by Love, God is healing not only us, but the whole creation.