Guard your heart

Proverbs 4:23 says "Above all else guard your heart".  Did you ever wonder why this is so important, I've thought about it off and on over the course of time and today I was reading "Soul Satisfaction" by Debra Evans and came upon what I think is one of the best explanations of the importance of guarding the heart. Let me share it with you.
"Over the years I learned that my heart holds the keys to revealing wonder and obscuring deception, transferring treasure and stockpiling venom, imparting love and absorbing evil......our hearts carry our most intimate histories, a life time ledger of passion and aggravation, gratitude and remorse, motives and meanings, rapture and loss.
Even though God has implanted an enduring desire for eternity in our hearts (Eccl 3:11), our earthbound status urges us to satisfy our soul's hunger with mirage-like substitutes. When we do, our deepest desires remain exasperatingly unfulfilled. We cannot find soul satisfaction- and by extension, our true identity, in anything or anyone but God.
It is easy to see how this all-too-familiar cycle starts spinning out of control: our lingering hunger propels us toward overdoing it -over-managing, over-eating, over-spending, over-nurturing, over-working, over-thinking, over-imagining, over-ministering, over-exercising, over-estimating, over-controlling, over-you name it.
Meanwhile our appetites stimulate our unfulfilled desire for gratification. So we end up wanting more. Once our hidden cravings receive enough pseudo nourishment and random reinforcement our desires grow more intense until, voila'.....

an impulsive sideways glance may unintentionally become a recurring thought pattern, which becomes a perceived need, which becomes a convincing rationale, which becomes a persistent focus, which becomes a routine habit, which becomes a fixated compulsion, which becomes and addictive dependency."


Does the subtlety of this hit you the way it did me?  It really got me thinking.....