From her book ‘A Heart Like His’ – Making Space for God’s Love in Your Life; Virginia H. Pearce shares:
Several years ago I took my mother shopping for a winter coat. Shopping is not my favorite activity and it was getting close to dinner time before we finally found the right coat. It was a soft grey wool with raglan sleeves that hung way below her fingertips and a hem that brushed the tops of her shoes. The saleswoman sent for the alterations lady, who helped Mother onto the raised platform and went to work. I sank into a chair in the corner in the fitting room, lost in my own little world, wondering if I had the time on the way home to pick up something for dinner.
Gradually on the edges of my consciousness, I began to hear a conversation. Mother would ask a question and the alterations lady would answer. The first answers were rather brief, but as the questions and interest from Mother continued, the answers continued, the answers became longer. The woman’s voice became more animated. By the time we left the two of them were laughing like old friends. And I was left out—a shriveled, self-absorbed, tired little soul in the corner. And withholding myself, I exited just as I had answered. I looked at Mother. She had come just as weary as I but was leaving with an extra spring in her step.
Aha. Here was a discovery that I didn’t recognize then, but when I began to experiment years later, I thought back on that afternoon and identified a process that is repeatable:
Opening one’s heart creates energy. Closing one’s heart depletes energy. As I sat in the corner of the dressing room with my little closed heart and thought about the things I still had to do, my fatigue increased. Mother looked down at the alterations lady and opened her heart by expressing an interest, and Mother’s energy increased. “Do you like your job? How long have you worked here? What about your family? Where are you from? An open heart looks outward. A closed heart looks inward.
I learned something else about opening hearts from the coat-buying encounter. An open heart very often coaxes open someone else’s closed heart. It’s almost magical. An open heart presents a safe place that others sense, and they respond, sometimes immediately and sometimes much more slowly. No matter, however, whether they respond or not, because, in the meantime, we feel so much better living this way. Go ahead, experiment for yourself. That’s what this is all about!
To the extent that we can come to see others differently,
we can undergo a fundamental change in our being, a change in our
emotions and attitudes, a change of heart.
~ C. Terry Warner ~
Virginia A. Pearce, ‘A Heart Like His’, (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 2006), 22-24
