Christian Living

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The day after Christmas, I flew from Orlando to Indiana to visit my family. Flying on the weekend after Christmas was an interesting decision, as the airport was packed out with people. To make matters worse, just the day before, a man on a flight to Detroit had tried and failed to blow up his plane, meaning that security all over the country was on high alert. The normally tight security was downright draconian this time through, and while I was standing there in line, it occurred to me that people guard their hearts in much the same way that security guards the airport.

If it hasn't happened to you, then I'm sure it's happened to someone you know. We get hurt in our lives; someone close to us does something painful, and we decide that the safe thing to do is to close off our hearts, to try and control who gets close to us, in the hopes of keeping the bombs and bad people far away from us. It seems like a normal enough reaction, maybe even a reasonable reaction - at any rate, there must be some reason why so many people respond to pain that way. I know I did it. I was in seventh grade when my parents divorced and I lived with my heart in lockdown for almost the next ten years. I didn't let anyone get close to me unless they passed the multiple layers of my security, until I was satisfied that they weren't going to blow me up.

But there are a few reasons why I don't think that's the best way to live.

First, as the man on the plane to Detroit showed us, you can never keep all the bad people out. No matter how good the security, someone will slip past it. Security is reactive: it responds to past problems, and all its policies are designed to stop the previous ways that people have tried to cause chaos. After the September 11 hijackers used knives, security banned knives. After a man named Richard Reid hid a bomb in his shoes, security made us all take off our shoes. But you see the key word: "after." You can never keep all the bad people out. The only thing you can do is lock your heart down tighter after the pain comes. And every time you get hurt, you up the security.

But the problem is that most of the people who fly are not terrorists, yet these people - the good people - are the ones who are hurt by the tight security. The Air Transport Association predicted that 33 million people would fly this holiday season. 32,999,999 of them were completely harmless, but were slowed down and inconvenienced by security that tried (and failed!) to find the remaining one. Similarly, when you try to guard your heart, most of the people you keep out are the people who you would actually want inside - the good people, who could help you and be real friends for you. But in your paranoid obsession with keeping the one bad man out, you stiff-arm all the good people. The good people end up paying the price for what the bad person did to you.

It's also interesting to observe that airport security makes us take off our shoes. I've noticed that most people don't take off their shoes unless they're in a comfortable and familiar place. They'll do it in a friend's house, but rarely in a stranger's, unless the stranger asks them to. It's sort of a statement of intimacy: I am comfortable here, and I don't foresee the need to run away. Unless a person is comfortable, the thought of taking off their shoes usually won't even occur to them. Yet airport security makes us do it, forces us to make that gesture of intimacy even though we're not comfortable and don't want to be intimate with them. If you make other people jump through hoops to get into your heart, you're kind of doing the same thing. You're saying, "You have to prove yourself to me. You have to let down your guard and let me examine you so that I can be convinced you're not going to do me harm." It's really unfair to those people for you to treat them as potential saboteurs, isn't it? You almost set yourself up as God when you say that you won't let them in unless they satisfy your conditions.

And that's really what a heart lockdown is all about: the desire for control, the desire to rule your own little world so that nothing unexpected or unpleasant happens. It sounds really bad to put it that way, doesn't it? And, like I said, it's an understandable desire, but it's very dangerous because it makes you deity in your own little world. When God says to love people, you say it's too painful. When God says to bear other people's burdens and let them bear yours, you say you won't open up to them. When God says to stop demanding control and instead trust him, you refuse, because God's way sometimes hurts and you're more concerned with avoiding pain than with following God.

As I've said, it's completely understandable, and very common, to respond to pain by going into lockdown. But being understandable and common doesn't mean that it's good for you, or even that it's the best way to respond. Airport security proves that. You can never keep all the bad people out, and you make the good people pay the price for what the bad people have done to you. Added to which, by trying to govern your own heart instead of opening it the way God says to, you're crippling your faith and insulting God - thinking that your way of living is better than his.

I don't know what would have happened if someone had pointed all this out to me when I was younger. Maybe it would have helped me realize sooner that God really does know what he's doing. Maybe I would have understood that there's more to life than avoiding pain, that avoiding pain does not equal achieving joy. Who knows. But while I stood in line to go through security, staring at the thousands of normal people who were paying the price for someone else's harm, I couldn't help but think that the world would be a really unpleasant place if everyone guarded their hearts that way.

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