Musical Musing: Jesus Paid It All

…Can melt the heart of stone…

What a striking image. A stone heart. We think of stone as hard and unyielding, perhaps as strong; it’s why stone was used for tools and is often used as building materials, right? A stone heart would be safe from all wounds, from all the slings and arrows and hurts life throws at it. A stone heart would be invulnerable… or at least, that’s what we might be fooled into thinking.

You see, a stone heart is worthless. A heart is a pump, a muscle. Hard and unyielding is dangerous to heart muscle; it can’t do it’s job if there’s no way for it to move or give. Soft and vulnerable is how the heart works. It contracts in one area to push blood in, contracts in another to force it out, pumping life through the body by the very softness that makes it so vulnerable.

And what about the weight? Could you carry a heavy stone heart in your chest? Or do you need the light lithe muscle that is your heart, soft, small, hidden behind its jail of ribs that protect it? A stone heart would be more weight than your body could bear.

Oh, you say, but the artist wasn’t talking about a physical stone heart. He was talking about our spiritual hearts. So let’s talk about those for a moment, instead. Like the physical muscular pump that circulates life-giving blood through your body, the heart that the artist speaks of is responsible for keeping your spirit alive, for keeping what keeps you separate from the animals going. It keeps you human and humane. It governs how you treat others around you.

Let’s say that you’ve had a difficult life. You’ve been hurt, a lot, by people close to you, people who were supposed to protect you, to care for you. You learned, at an early age, that the only way to keep going, was to protect yourself. You stopped letting people close to you. It hurt too much when they got close. Who could blame you, really? You walled off your heart, let it grow stony and cold and distant.

Except you forgot that hearts have to be soft and warm and vulnerable to work. That the nature of life is that it hurts. That people will let you down. It’s the way of things. Most people aren’t evil and looking for ways to hurt you or let you down, but there are a few sick, twisted weirdos who seem to get off on it. I know, Beloved. I get it. I get it, because I’ve lived it.

So you’ve got this problem now: you have a heart of stone, and you know that hearts don’t work when they’re stony and cold, and you want the soft, warm, vulnerable heart back, because you’re dying in that walled off world you’ve built yourself, and you don’t know how to get out. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a way out, you can have a tender heart again, and that life is well worth living with a soft, tender heart. Love is a risk well worth the taking. The bad news is that… well, Beloved, life is painful, and it’s going to hurt to undo what you’ve done, and you’re going to have to trust again… and you’ve stopped trusting a long time ago.

You see, you have to unmake that heart of stone without destroying it. You have to purify it, refine it. That means the Maker is going to melt it down, melt away the dross, the impurities, and soften it so that it works again. But fires are hot (one of the early lessons we teach our children, right?) and they burn. There are going to be trials and tests and hard times that are going to come… and it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to hurt. But what worth having in life comes easily?

Jesus comes to melt hearts of stone… because stone may seem strong, but it’s worthless material for a tender, vital heart. And it’s a hard process, but the end product is well worth it. Beloved, take it from reformed stony heart.