Picture this: two college girls sitting in their brand new apartment on an actual dark and stormy night. While one girl does work on her laptop, the other girl, in a slightly sleepy haze, fiddles with her planner. That girl is me, and what I found in this planner was a bible verse, one which I proceeded to read aloud to my roommate without really taking in what it said. Pulling her head up from her laptop for a moment, she looked over at me to comment that a verse like that would go well in an article. It was something happy, something to liven up your day, and in a sweet twist, those words woke me up more than the copious amounts of coffee I'd drank that day, and made me feel more alive than I had felt in the entirety of those last 24 hours.
That's because those few words that my roommate shared with me before she turned back to her laptop to finish her work really stuck with me. They made me think more than I had all day because yes, sharing a bible verse with the world that was so inspiring and happy would indeed make for a good article, one that other people might benefit from reading. Except, it would be an even better article if I actually understood this bible verse, if I actually thought about it rather than taking it at face value as something nice that might make me happy without really thinking about what it meant.
That's what woke me up, and that's what got me thinking about something really, really important during a thunderstorm at 12 o'clock in the morning, and at this point, you're probably wondering just what exactly that something is.
The verse comes from Matthew 6:22 and reads, "for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
If you aren't looking to think about what you're reading, then I think it is all too simple to accept these words at face value with their upbeat, happy connotation. If you aren't looking to think about what you're reading, then you might not get all that much out of it, and there I was, sitting in our living room at midnight, trying not to do just that. That's because when you think about it, you might not necessarily love what you find.
I believe that this verse forces you to look at where exactly you "treasure" lies, as in, what that treasure is. This is to say, what do you treasure, or care about, most in life? While we want to believe that we treasure good things such as family, friends, our faith, and the Lord and our relationship with him, I think it's all too simple in today's society to get caught up in other things. It's all too simple to begin treasure things such as money, fame, and things of a dark nature.
When these things begin to creep into our sort of "treasure box," I think they often times begin to push other things out, given that a box only has space to store but so much, and as this verse alludes to, that's something we need to be careful of.
That's because, in that space where we find those things we treasure most, we also find our hearts too, and so if we want to create a space for a good heart, and spiritually clean heart, then we need to make sure that those things we treasure most in life align with those values.
When it comes down to it, I think my planner might have accidentally given me a chance to take a deeper look at where my heart is, and I hope it might provide you with the same, and when you think about it, it's just a little crazy. I mean, all that from a planner?
