“If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” As believers of Christ, we certainly do not want hard hearts, but in the busy world we live in, in all the different messages and cynicism that bombard us each day, in the frustrations and anger that may arise within us, we may easily develop hearts that are hard and jaded. The grace of God calls out to us today during our Lenten journey: it calls us to renew our hearts and to return to him. Jeremiah spoke out to a people that had definitely hardened their hearts and stiffened their necks. God reminded them through Jeremiah that he had sent them prophets and servants, but that often they had been rejected. Echoing the reality that Jeremiah spoke about, we can reflect upon how we often reject God in a lot of different ways in our lives, in our thoughts and in our actions, in the thoughtlessness and hardness in which we treat our brothers and sisters, in the way we do not make our faith a priority in our lives. What can we do about that? Thomas Merton had this to say: We can often hide the precepts of God’s wisdom in our hearts – the precepts of humility, meekness, charity, renunciation, faith, and prayer. The values that the precepts and prayers communicate, the life that they are trying to give us, can remain completely hidden from our human eyes. Let us open our hearts up to the Lord, to the values he is trying to teach us. Let us not turn our hearts away from him, no matter how much of a temptation that may be. Let our hearts not become hardened.
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