When the Heart Races
Part 2 of Reordering the Heart—A Lenten Series
One Sunday afternoon I stopped to gas up my car. Another man was filling his RV on the opposite side of the same pump. He kept sneaking glances at me. It dawned on me that I was still wearing my clerical collar.
When our eyes met, he said something like this:
“We didn’t make it to church today. Our daughter is a dancer. Her team travels. So, each weekend we’re in Houston, Dallas, or Austin. That’s why we bought this RV. Look, we’re believers. But we have to get her to those competitions.”
I smiled and said, “Sounds like you’re really proud of her.” When my pump clicked off, I said goodbye, got in my car, and pulled away.
On the way home, I kept thinking about what he had said. Not that his daughter dances, but that she is a dancer. Dancing wasn’t simply something she did. It was who she was. By devoting herself to perfecting her art, she was being true to herself.
Being true to who we are matters deeply. It’s how life feels worth living. A full-hearted life feels meaningful, purposeful, and worth living. And so the question presses in on all of us, sooner or later: Who am I, really?
Our culture offers a very clear answer. The self, we’re told, is something that resides within. Each of us has a unique inner core—desires, abilities, dreams—that defines who we truly are. To live authentically is to express that inner self outwardly. Freedom, then, means having the space and permission to become who you already feel yourself to be.
Sociologist Robert Bellah famously called this way of understanding ourselves expressive individualism. It shows up everywhere. Glenn Close captured it well in her Golden Globes acceptance speech: “We have to find personal fulfillment. We have to follow our dreams. We have to say, ‘I can do that, and I should be allowed to do that.’”
This vision of the self doesn’t usually feel like a philosophy or an ideology. It feels obvious. Natural. We don’t argue ourselves into it. We see the world through it. It shapes what seems reasonable, desirable, and even possible—long before we stop to think about it.
You could think of this as a tacit religion. Not a church with doctrines and rituals, but a shared story about what the good life is and how to get there. That story tells us that meaning and value are achieved through self-expression and personal accomplishment. In this story, the self is autonomous—self-directed, self-defined, self-made.
At first, this feels liberating. Especially for people who have experienced religion primarily as constraint or conformity. Many who leave church do so because they believe faith stands in the way of being true to themselves.
But there’s a shadow side to this story. If your true self is something you must express and achieve, then your life becomes a project. And projects are always evaluated. Measured. Compared.
We begin to keep score. Quietly, sometimes unconsciously. We assess ourselves as if we might land on one of those invisible greatness lists: most successful, most admired, most accomplished, most faithful. Even when we say we’re only competing with ourselves, the pressure doesn’t ease. Our standards simply keep rising.
This is what Andrew Root calls secular guilt. There’s no external judge, but there is an inner critic that never quite rests. Do more. Be better. Don’t fall behind. And because this story has no God at its center, there’s no real absolution. Only the demand to keep striving.
The result is often exhaustion. And a subtle alienation—from others, and eventually from ourselves.
Jesus offers a radically different account of how a self comes into being. When Nicodemus comes to him by night, eager to understand what faithful life looks like, Jesus doesn’t give him a method or a program. He tells him, instead, that life with God begins with being born from above.
Nicodemus is understandably confused. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” In other words: How do I make this happen?
Jesus gently refuses the premise of the question. The true self is not something we achieve through effort or insight. It is something we receive. “What is born of the flesh is flesh,” he says, “and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
In a culture that tells us we must author ourselves, Jesus suggests that the self is not authored at all. It’s received. He suggests that becoming our true self does not begin with autonomy, but with openness. Not with control, but with receptivity.
Reflection and Prayer
When you think about who you are, what feels most central to your identity?
When has choosing your own path felt freeing? When has it felt lonely or exhausting?
When you feel pressure to succeed or prove yourself, what voice do you hear inside? Where do you think that voice learned to speak?
What might it mean to receive your identity from God rather than construct it yourself? What stirs in you when you imagine being “born from above”?
Merciful God, when we measure ourselves and feel we are never enough, turn us from anxious striving and remind us we are your beloved. Make us new by your Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
That’s it for this week friends. Part 3 of Reordering the Heart drops next Friday. Until then, be well and God bless.
Jake
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Thank you for this wise reflection. I am coming to see what I would call the 'constructed self' as the accumulation of the things we do to defend ourselves and the things we do to perform a sense of specialness. The true self, the locus of the heart, resides in a spacious center where nothing needs to be defended, and nothing needs to be performed. From this place one can simply be - as onself and with and for others.
When you described your interaction at the gas station, I had to laugh a little. The gentleman‘s first response was to feel judgment when he saw your collar because he wasn’t at church. His second response was to justify his decision to not be at church. I wonder how far down the road he was before he realized that. YOU weren’t at church either since you were at the same gas station. Lol 😆.
I wonder why his initial thought was that God would be displeased if he went on the road to take his daughter to her dance rather than be at church.
I’m not sure when exactly productivity became the identifying characteristic of a person. But we do reinforce it every day because usually right after inquiring about somebody’s name (which isn’t the same as asking “who are you“)the first question we ask is “what do you do“.
But I also don’t know that it not reinforced when we read stories of Jesus, separating sheep and goats based on productivity. However, he does seem to have a different definition of what “productivity“ is and to be fair he seems to define it as looking out for each other rather than what occupation that we hold.
As always, appreciate your words .