Rend Your Heart Was Said to People Who Felt Nothing at All

A woman asked me a question at a table once that I have not been able to shake.

She said: how do you know if you have actually repented, if you do not feel anything?

She was not being clever. She was tired. She said she had been praying about the same thing for a long time and that in the beginning there had been tears and a kind of heat, and now there was neither, and she had begun to suspect that the tears had been the real part and that what was left was going through motions.

I did not have a good answer at the table. I gave her a bad one, which was warm and true and did not touch the actual question, and I thought about it for about a year afterward.

Here is what I would say now, and it starts with a verse that is nearly always used to mean the opposite of what it says.

The verse is not asking for more feeling

Here it is.

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil. (Joel 2:13, King James Version)

Rending garments was the public display. It was the visible thing, the one everybody could see, the tearing of clothes in the street.

So when Joel says rend the heart and not the garments, he is not asking for a bigger display. He is taking the display off the table and saying the transaction happens somewhere nobody is watching, including, and this is the part that matters, including the person themselves.

The heart in Hebrew is not the emotions. It is the seat of the will and the mind, the place where a person decides things. Rending it is not producing a feeling. It is the tearing open of what a person has settled.

Which means the woman at the table was asking for a report from a room where the report does not come from.

You are not required to produce a display, and Joel explicitly takes the visible half off the table. Joel 2:13 sets the heart against the garments and moves the whole thing out of view. It is the Spirit of God, 1 Corinthians 2:11 who alone knows the things of a man, who does the seeing that a person cannot do inside themselves.

Look at what the verse gives as the reason

The instruction is only half the verse. Read the clause that follows, because it carries the weight.

for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness

The reason given for turning is not that God is angry and must be appeased. The reason given is what He is like. Joel is describing the One they are turning toward, and the description is the argument.

That is worth sitting with if the feeling has gone. A person who cannot feel anything is usually trying to work up the fuel to move. Joel does not supply fuel. He supplies a fact about the destination, and lets the fact do the moving.

And these are among the oldest words in the Bible about God's character, quoted from Exodus 34, repeated across centuries by different writers. It is the sentence Israel kept coming back to, and they came back to it because it kept being true when nothing else was.

You are turning toward Somebody whose character is the argument rather than your feeling. Joel 2:13 gives graciousness and mercy as the reason to turn. It is His Spirit, Romans 5:5 shedding the love of God abroad in the heart, who makes an old sentence about His character land in a numb chest.

His word does not depend on the temperature in the room

Here is the verse that finally answered the woman's question for me, and it is not about feelings at all.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11)

It shall not return unto me void. The effectiveness is a property of the word, not of the state of the person receiving it.

That is the whole answer. A prayer said flatly, out of a numb chest, standing on what God has actually said, is doing something, because the doing was never located in the emotion. It is located in what was said and Who said it.

I am not saying feelings do not matter. They are a gift and when they come they carry a person a long way. What I am saying is that they are the weather, and the word is the ground, and a farmer does not stop planting because the sky is gray.

You have a word underneath you that does not need your temperature to work. Isaiah 55:11 makes the accomplishing a property of the word rather than of the hearer, and it is the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 6:17 calling the word the sword of the Spirit, who carries it whether or not anything is felt.

David talks to himself about this in the middle of a psalm

If anybody thinks flatness is a modern problem, David interrogates his own numbness out loud.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

Notice he is talking to himself rather than reporting on himself. He does not wait to feel like praising. He instructs his own soul, out loud, in the middle of not feeling it.

And he says I shall yet praise him, which is a man making an appointment he cannot currently keep, and keeping the appointment on the books.

Paul says the same thing in five words that get quoted constantly and understood rarely: we walk by faith, not by sight. Sight includes the inward kind. What a person sees when they look inside themselves is not the instrument the New Testament tells them to navigate by.

You are walking by something other than what you can see when you look inside. 2 Corinthians 5:7 says we walk by faith, not by sight. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who supplies a report that self examination cannot produce.

And if the numbness has spread out past this one thing and into most of the week, say it out loud to somebody: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Flatness that covers everything is worth taking to a person, and taking it there is wisdom rather than weakness.