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Follow Your Heart - Actually, Don't

by James Barringer  
9/09/2009 / Christian Living

It's kind of funny how the theme of "follow your heart" has so throughly permeated American culture from top to bottom. Ask a high school guidance counselor what you should be when you grow up, and they'll say, "Whatever you want to be." Just follow your heart and you'll be fine. Watch any children's movie and that's the philosophy presented. Don't listen to anyone else, just do what you want to do. Your wants are the only thing worth following, they say. I'm of the opinion that this is actually one of the most vicious and destructive philosophies that a person could hold, and I'd like to lay out three major reasons why.

First, emotions are an incredibly volatile and unreliable rudder. I'm sure that most of us have felt things during our lives that weren't true, such as "I'm worthless," "I'm unlikable," or others along those lines. Frequently, these feelings are false. Let me repeat that for emphasis: Simply feeling something does not make it true. That could be, and probably will be, an entire essay all by itself. If emotions are not always true, then they are inaccurate and unreliable for the purpose of making major life decisions. You can't base a decision on a falsehood, or else the decision is equally false. Many people "followed their hearts" on a day when they were feeling worthless, and their answer was suicide. This is not an extreme example, either, as thousands of people continue to make that decision every day.

And we can't simply say "follow your heart, but don't commit suicide," because that inserts a fat wall of separation between us and our emotions. It's saying that there are times when it is not best to follow your heart, which shatters the whole philosophy. Either emotions are worth following, or they are not. And if they are not sometimes, then they are not ever - because how will you, the person who is experiencing the emotions, ever know when they're true and when they're lying to you? Emotions are simply not reliable enough to be the foundation for major life choices.

Second, emotions were never designed to be your rudder. Neither emotion nor reason was meant to be the sole basis by which we navigate the universe. On their own, and even working in tandem, emotion and logic are both pathetically inadequate to help us understand life. All we need to do is look at politics for proof. Did you know that in the United States, within the last 80 years, it was mandatory by law that all mentally retarded people be surgically sterilized so they couldn't pass down their retarded genes? Anyone with an ounce of compassion is horrified by the idea, but that's what pure logic gets you. Neither is pure emotion sufficient, because with any proposed idea, we must evaluate the cost to our budget and other considerations. If we did whatever we wanted to do with our country, we would run out of money to pay for it all, and quickly build a debt so massive that no one else would loan us money and we would go bankrupt. Untempered logic leads to emotionless, compassionless decisions, and untempered emotion leads to foolish, volatile, unreliable decisions. Neither alone is sufficient. Even together they are not sufficient, which I will explain in point three.

Things get more complicated here, because we can't blend logic into emotion or else we're telling people not to follow their hearts. We're telling them to follow their hearts plus their heads, or their hearts plus our arbitrary cultural standards, or whatnot. And this is where it really gets hairy: if we have to tell them to follow their hearts plus something else, what is the "something else"? Who decides what that should be? Now we're really into can-of-worms territory because we have just established that there is a right way to make decisions and also a wrong way, "following your heart" being among the wrong ways. In other words, not every method of decision making is equally valid. If this is the case, and then we consider the statement "follow your heart, plus something else," then we must admit that not all "something else"s are equally valid either. We've already destroyed the gentle pluralism of "do your own thing" by saying that not all "your own thing"s are good or even acceptable ways to act.

Third, we weren't meant to be the rudder at all. The reason our emotions and reason are not sufficient to guide us is that they weren't given to us for that purpose. We were not created to be the mini-gods of our own universe, which is what we're trying to do if we brazenly take our lives into our hands and insist that we determine where they're going. Let me be very clear here: the alternative to following your heart is to follow someone else's heart. How do you decide which way your life will go? Either you do what you want to do, or you do what someone else wants you to do. And there is a "someone else" whose opinion is not merely reliable, but authoritative.

The fact of the matter is that God placed us here with a purpose already built-in. It's not ours to decide. He's the one who thought us up, he's the one who placed us in the family where we are, he's the one who gave us the gifts and skills and abilities that we have. Does anyone really believe that he would put that much care into designing us, and then just turn us loose here without any opinion about what we do? On the contrary, he cares immensely. He has a plan that will benefit humanity and satisfy us, and all we have to do is talk to him and follow his plan instead of our own.

Paul tells us very clearly in the New Testament: "You are not your own. You were bought with a price." We don't get to choose anymore, because we don't belong to ourselves. We belong to God, and he gets to decide. He always did get to decide; we just rebelled against him and tried to pretend he didn't exist, and look how that went for us. My life pre-salvation is the best answer I could ever give to a person who thinks I should follow my heart. I was a mess; I had wrong feelings about my own value, I mistreated people with different political opinions, I was rude to people who Jesus would have been nice to, I listened to music with terrible messages, and if I'm really honest, not many people liked me because of who I was. That's what following my heart got me. Were you any different before you were saved?

Why would I want my plan to be as small as my own heart, when I could have a plan as huge and vibrant as God's vision and purpose for all of humanity? Following my heart might make me happy (probably not), but following God's heart will go far beyond making me happy, in allowing me to have a role in this story that's as huge as mankind itself. I'd be a fool to intentionally choose a small plan which is unlikely to succeed when my alternative is the guaranteed promise that God offers instead.

Those are the three reasons I believe that the "follow your heart" philosophy is destructive. Emotions lie and aren't a reliable basis for decision-making. They were also not designed to be our rudder. Lastly, even if they were reliable, we still don't get to be the ones who decide what happens in our lives, and even if we did, God has a much bigger vision and purpose than anything my puny old heart could ever dream up. It's a subtly attractive philosophy, this idea of following your heart, but I hope you will now understand it properly and be equipped to correct and minister to those who are deluded by it.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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