Understanding All The Heart

Trust in the Lord with all your heart...

ALL my heart? Really? What does that even mean? And so my quest to attempt clarity on this section of Proverbs 3 -

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight".


I have a need for straight paths. Even if I had more desire for straight paths then for trusting God with all my heart, it appears that the way to straight paths is trust, and so I am very interested in understanding what it means to trust with all your heart. I have been wondering that for the last few weeks, ALL YOUR HEART, trust. How can you know that you are doing that or how can you know you are not?

I am a watcher. It is both a good and bad trait - but one result of the good traits is that I have observed a lot of religious people over the years who would have done well to read The Emperor's New Clothes along with their bibles. This observance has caused me to seriously question myself when I start to think that I really understand a spiritual principal. So I approached this particular quest with a bit of frustration wondering if I could really understand what ALL MY HEART meant. I'm still not sure I can, but I think I started to get a clue when I ran across this scripture,

As Jesus looked up, he saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. "Truly I tell you," he said. "this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put all she had to live on."  Luke 21:1-4                
"but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on"

Reading this scripture passage I wondered about this woman and what she might have been thinking when she put her money in. I wondered why she did it. She gave out of her lack of supply. The rich were giving out of their supply and most likely not very challenged in their trust to do so. If I have $100,000. 00 in the bank and I give the church $1,000.00, that wouldn't stretch my faith at all as to how giving that amount might affect me and my personal circumstances. But if I only had $20.00 and I gave $20.00 to God's purposes, that would certainly put myself squarely in the hands of God to take care of me after that donation was done.

I also wondered about the life the widow lived contrasted with the lives the rich lived. I can imagine that she had seen her share of stress and want and as the definition of poverty defines, her share of lack of supply. Stress, want and lack of supply. These are all not very desirable conditions, yet it seems that they may have been the very thing that caused this widow to be able to make such a donation, and they are also the very things that caused Jesus to notice her and praise her act. And I'm wondering, am I getting close to understanding what it means to trust the Lord with all my heart?