My heart is my armor

Recently, I've had the album "Blurryface" by Twenty One Pilots on repeat.

My brother introduced me to them and, for whatever reason, I've had this impression that they're a metal band, but they're actually a really cool indie band. Not like metal isn't cool. It's just overwhelming. Anyways.

So they have this one song called "Tear In My Heart" that quickly became my favorite song on the album for several reasons, but the biggest one is because of one line: my heart is my armor.

Which is so counter-intuitive to what we're bombarded by on a daily basis. We're told that we should protect our hearts, that they're vulnerable, that they break easily. Wearing our hearts on our sleeves is a bad thing because it makes them easy to access and easy to hurt. We guard them. We hide them away.

Those things aren't bad necessarily. The danger is that they can allow for a lot of callous to build up and we go too defensive rather than protecting them to be safe and healthy.

But the idea as my heart as my armor is a mind-blowing concept.

Because if we believe that we keep the Lord in our hearts, that he makes our hearts his home, shouldn't it be the strongest, most well-fortified place we have? And not fortified in the sense that it throws rocks or hollers insults at any passerby--you probably won't catch God yelling "Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!" at some guy/girl who comes calling. But fortified in that it is not easily taken advantage of or swayed by each passing whim.

Rather than being a fragile sign of life, it should be an expanding kingdom.

The challenge that we're faced with is this: we are human, so we want control of what we view is ours. But when we ask the Lord to come in so he can make our hearts his home, we transcend our nature and relent control over the center of our perceived wellspring of life.

The key phrase in that is "transcend our nature." We will always, always, be fighting for that control back. Even if we know it would be bad to take it back, we want it. But when we demand that God remove his armor so we can have our way is when our hearts go from being well protected to inviting attack.

I'm not saying that we will not know heartache if we surrender ourselves to God, but the healing will come at a much healthier rate and through healthier means. The Lord allows the chinks so that he can show us that not only is he a knight, but a doctor.

My heart is my armor because the Lord has set up shop in there. He's a protector, and he desires to tend to his creation.

We just need to let him.