Years ago, my friend Ann, who’s a nurse, told me about a patient that she had in the CCU. A girl in her early twenties who had suffered a freak chiropractic accident. She was completely paralyzed from head to toe. She couldn’t move anything and couldn’t even speak. The only mobile part of her was her eyes. The only tool she had to communicate with. This young girl with her whole life ahead of her was trapped in her own body. They call it “locked in syndrome”.
It’s a horrifying thought. Your mind functioning normally in terms of thoughts and emotions, but no longer able to send signals to the body to move and operate as it once did. Trapped. What an agonizingly hopeless feeling.
Sometimes I feel trapped in my own heart. My mind is functioning normally (my normal any way) and knows what do do and not do, what it’s capable of doing and what it’s not. But many times it doesn’t seem able to operate my heart.
It shows up in various ways through my attitudes, my actions, my thoughts, my choices. But the common denominator for all of those captors of my heart is selfishness. I want what I want when I want it. My mind knows that isn’t right and tries desperately to change my heart through logic and reason. But it’s as if there is no connection between the two at times, and my soul too often falls captive to the enticing lure of my selfish heart.
There could very easily be a sense of despair in all of this. A feeling of no escape. No control over my own heart, soul and mind. Locked In Syndrome.
But my problem with a selfish heart is not unique. It’s the human condition. Selfishness has held man captive since the very beginning of time in a garden with a piece of fruit. It’s the root of all things ugly.
Even Paul, an incredibly influential spiritual leader in the New Testament, said that he struggled with this dilemma in Romans chapter seven:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Paul understood the feeling of being “locked in”. Trapped. But he also knew that Jesus holds the key to those prison doors. He bought our freedom when He died on the cross. Good overcoming evil. Life overcoming death. He unlocked the doors of our individual cells and released us. All we have to do is follow Him out.
So why do I want to crawl back in there sometimes? Why do I walk away from that freedom? Selfishness. When I make those choices or have that attitude, I only have to think about me. That’s all that exists in my personal cell. Me, me, me. No one else matters, because in that place, no one else exists. Sounds even more terrible and ridiculous in those terms.
Jesus, I am sooooooooo thankful that you understand my condition. You knew I couldn’t get out on my own. That even on days when I crawl back in, I don’t have it in me to walk back out. But You have it in You. All the strength and power that I need to enjoy that freedom from selfishness that You offer. Help me want it enough to ask for Your help. Help me to choose You and others over me. Make my heart a healthy place today where selfless love and true freedom live fully. And then use that heart as You choose…
Luke 4:18 – He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free…
