Unite My Heart to Fear Thy Name

She has known for a long time that her heart is in two pieces and she has never been able to fix it.

It is not a scandal. There is no secret. What there is, is a steady and lifelong pull toward a way of living that is comfortable, well thought of and slightly smaller than what she believes God has said, and she has been negotiating between the two since she was about twenty five.

She has read the books. She has made the resolutions. She has had, over forty years, perhaps six or seven decisive moments where something was settled with tears, and each time it held for a season and then the pull came back, not dramatically, just steadily, the way water finds a level.

She is sixty three now and the sameness of it is what wears on her. Not the failure. The repetition.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She has assumed that a whole heart is something a person achieves, and that at sixty three she has run out of runway to achieve it in.

Read who does the uniting

There is a request in the eighty sixth psalm that is easy to read past because the first half is more famous.

Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name.Psalm 86:11

Unite my heart.

Read the grammar of that. It is a request, not a resolution. He does not say I will unite my heart, or I have determined to be undivided, and he does not describe a method for getting there.

He asks God to do it.

And the man asking is not a beginner. This is the psalm of a man deep in a life of prayer, and what he has evidently discovered somewhere along the way is that he cannot make himself want one thing, and that the wanting of one thing is something he has to receive rather than construct.

Your uniting is His work to do rather than yours to complete, and Psalm 86:11 puts it in the form of a request. That is what the word actually does with it, not an excuse I am handing you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who unites what a woman has been unable to unite in forty years.

Forty years of the right diagnosis and the wrong job

Now the plain thing, and it is not a criticism of the six or seven moments.

The division was real and you saw it correctly. That diagnosis has been correct since the age of twenty five, and the tears in those moments were real and God was in them, and I am not going to reduce forty years of honest struggle to a mistake.

What has been misassigned is the repair. You took a condition that the psalmist brings to God as a petition and treated it as a personal project with milestones, and personal projects run on willpower, and willpower is precisely the faculty that a divided heart cannot supply reliably, because it is divided.

That is why it holds for a season. A season is roughly how long that faculty lasts.

And nothing about a divided heart has ever put you outside His work. Scripture has a man of prayer asking for the uniting rather than reporting it as achieved, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a sixty three year old to sort herself out first.

Ask for it, in those words, out loud

Here is the practical piece, and it is a change of category rather than of effort.

Pray the second half of the verse, out loud, in those words, this week.

Unite my heart to fear Thy name.

Not as a resolution dressed as a prayer, which is what most of the last forty years have been. As a request, in the plain sense, the way you would ask somebody to do something you cannot do.

And notice what the first half of the verse says: teach me thy way; I will walk in thy truth. There is walking in it. This is not passivity. You go on doing the ordinary things and you stop trying to manufacture the undividedness underneath them, which was never available to you anyway.

You are able to ask for this rather than achieve it, and the asking was the form it came in. Psalm 86:11 prays unite my heart rather than resolving to unite it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does that work in a woman of sixty three in a mountain kitchen.