For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:21 (NET)
The Heart Comes Later
The bookcase is pine, and the woman building it has never built anything. Her first shelf came out a quarter inch short on one end, so she screwed it in crooked, then took it out and did it worse. She watches the video with sawdust on her phone screen. Three weekends in, she is bad at this, and she is out there on Saturday morning anyway.
Her heart came along after her Saturdays. She never decided one morning to care about a bookcase, and now she thinks about shelf pins at red lights. It looks like the verse working right in front of you: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The comparison goes about that far. Jesus says the line inside a warning about where you store things, with moths and vermin and thieves in the sentence just before it, and he goes on from there to say that no one can serve two masters, naming money as the other one. A bookcase costs her three Saturdays. She can quit in April and lose a weekend.
So the mechanism is the same and the stakes are somewhere else entirely. Whatever gets the hours gets the heart, and no one signs anything. A grudge turns into a personality that way. So does a man who started praying because his wife asked him to and now prays when she’s out of town.
Taken as a diagnosis, the line cuts in directions nobody enjoys, and it was never a technique for getting a return. It tells you where to go looking for your own heart, and it says you will find it wherever you have been putting things.
That is uncomfortable and it is also useful, because the repair starts with the hours. You can move those. The feeling is slow and stubborn and it will come along behind, later than you want, the way it always does.
She draws the line on the next board and sets the saw against it.
A Prayer to Remember
My week is already spoken for, Lord, every hour of it picked by me with my eyes open, and I can see plainly where my heart has been following. Don’t wait until I feel differently about any of it. Take one afternoon out of my hands this week and put it where you want it, and let the rest of me come along behind.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
