Still Quarrying: Divided Heart.

 To the movies on Saturday to see ‘Back to Black’, the Amy Winehouse biopic. I didn’t go with any great knowledge of her life or music but was drawn to the story, albeit one that is all too familiar of a life ruined, and talent wasted.  She was only 27 when she died of alcohol poisoning after a significant period of sobriety.  

One of the most poignant aspects of the movie is Amy’s relationship with her grandmother who Amy describes as ‘my icon in everything.’  Like her, Amy has a deep yearning for a family of her own and there are several moments when Amy interacts with children with interest and tenderness.  And yet along with this is the ever-present pull towards drugs and alcohol which in effect renders family life beyond her.  

Amy’s was a lifestyle most people would revolt against and yet this divided life between the best of aspirations and dark reality is something we all have to live with to some extent.  It is life’s greatest challenge to be what we want to be.   The Psalmist prays intensely:

‘Teach me your way, Lord, 

that I may rely on your faithfulness.

give me an undivided heart,

that I may fear your name.’   (Psalm 86: 11)  

  

An ‘undivided heart’ that lives entirely according to the way of God. Not according to the darker impulses that lead in another direction.   This diversion was something that the Apostle Paul felt very powerfully even after his most dramatic conversion.  It showed itself in his awareness of the goodness in the Law of God but also in his inability to put it into practise.  Despite the presence of the Holy Spirit in his life, he still possess a ‘sinful nature’, broken, and still with a tendency to work against ‘the way of God’.  

In Romans 7: 14- 20 Paul speaks in anguish of his awareness of what is good and his inability to put it into practise:

‘I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do but what I hate I do.’  (v. 15).  

And:

‘For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For I do not do the good I want to do but the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing . . .” (vv. 18-19) 

Paul ends up by saying there is a kind of Civil War going on within his ‘inner being’ that too often he loses.  His desperate need is to be taken out of this deadly conflict and that is only possible through Christ the Deliverer who through His  grace grants forgiveness and through His Spirit provides the strength to overcome.   Listen to Paul’s cry:

‘What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!’  (vv. 24-25)

It has been my privilege through the years to know men and women who have known the horrors of addiction, destructive of themselves and important relationships, but have come to know the power of the Deliverer.  The struggles may have continued even to the extent of what addicts call a ‘fall’ but in their renewed life, like Paul, they were able to cry out to the Deliverer and to know His strength and His peace. And in sharing his personal Civil War Paul has given us all hope that as we deal with our own compulsive behaviours, in the Holy Spirit there is a way through.