Why The Wholehearted Project?
“I think she is disconnected from her heart.”
That’s the way a friend described me six years ago when someone asked about me. She never told me at the time; she only shared it with me in the last year. And she was right. But had she told me four or five years ago, I would have dismissed her. At the time, I viewed almost all negative emotions as sinful. I *wholeheartedly* embraced the prophet Jeremiah’s words that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9), which meant that we couldn’t trust ourselves.
All of this made me dogmatic, closed-minded, and rigid—mostly toward myself, but it did bleed out onto others and even into my early years of teaching and writing. But through a series of divine interruptions, God began re-introducing me to my heart, and subsequently to his heart. It was from this fertile ground that new life began to spring up in me, and The Wholehearted Project was born.
Jeremiah’s words are true; they just aren’t the whole truth. Jeremiah was doing far more in that passage than making a definitive for-all-time statement about my heart and yours. Yet, it is true that the heart (our will, thoughts, motivations, and emotions) is infected with sin, which means, at best, our motives are often mixed, and our emotions can and do lead us astray. But if we build our entire theological framework of the heart around this one verse, out of its complete context, the logical conclusion we come to is that there is nothing good or true or beautiful in humanity, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
We were created in the image of God, which means that each of us reflects aspects of his character, his heart, his creativity, and his beauty to the world.
Even those who do not believe in or follow Jesus exhibit God’s attributes of love, service, generosity, and justice—sometimes even more so than those of us who profess to follow Jesus. And part of bearing God’s image includes our emotions. When we cut ourselves off from our emotions, we not only cut ourselves off from our humanity but also from the ways we are
God-like. Worse yet, it cuts us off from experiencing the care and compassion of Christ!
The Wholehearted Project is an invitation to live a truer story, one that embraces the “both-and” of life—the broken and beautiful; the groaning and gratitude. It’s an invitation to live in a world where both doubt and devotion, faith and fear, can co-exist in the life of a faithful believer. It’s an invitation to show up to the world, to yourself, and to God as a sinner, sufferer, and saint. It’s an invitation to be equally alive to pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow.
“It’s an invitation to see emotions not as governors, but as guides; not something to be stifled, but as something to be stewarded.
My heart behind The Wholehearted Project is that you find a place to know and be known, first and foremost, by the God who created you and loves you deeply by providing you with resources that equip you to engage the Scriptures, explore your story, encounter Jesus, and experience his care.
So what do you say? Are you ready to live a truer story?
Have you heard about Encountering Jesus in John—An Advent Study?
