A civil engineer here in Boise shared a consultant’s advice on how the city should plan for growth. The consultant listed three factors a city needs in order to create and sustain a thriving urban culture. 1) A cool downtown scene. 2) A reputable four-year college. 3) Adequate infrastructure. That last one is the peskiest.
As cities grow, roads and traffic create a bolttleneck. It’s like when your arteries near your heart or brain get constricted. Everything else starts to suffer. City planners respond largely by widening roads. What are you doing when you widen a road and build better infrastructure? You’re making things more accessible. You’re allowing more people to pass through, which means more places can be built, more needs can be met, and better attractions become available. We would do well to apply that lesson to ourselves.
One of my favorite lines in the Bible is from the Apostle Paul talking to the Corinthians, who were citizens of an affluent, happening metropolis. He pleads with them to “widen their hearts” (2 Cor 6:13). Nobody else is holding them back. Their biggest obstacle is their own narrow-heartedness. They’re exhausting all their emotional energy on a tiny playing field: their homes, their money, their families, their fun. That’s it. Their world is flat, dull, and repetitive, despite its outward bustle.
The call of the Christian message is to want more. To widen your heart. Too often, we hang a low ceiling over our imagination, and live the rest of our lives cramped and hunched over. Of course, you figure, I have to grow up. That’s what it means to be an adult after all—bills and taxes, cubicles and crosswords. But our growing up is really settling for a narrow, congested experience. In our hearts, we travel the same roads, see the same sights, visit the same stores, and come back mostly feeling frustrated by the traffic. Everybody else is trying to shove and honk their way down those same crowded streets (money, sex, status).
We have no one to blame but ourselves. Widening our hearts means being more open, looking for more pathways that will take us to larger and greater things, searching for the transcendent and eternal. We catch a glimpse of these things in the windows of our life, almost as they pass by – relationships, love, meaningful work, but then we re-focus on the same few narrow roads we think are the only ways to get around.
The problem isn’t ordinary life. Jesus slept, ate, joked, and paid taxes. The problem is that we’re content with the ordinary. We need to widen our hearts. We need to learn how the ordinary are sign posts to the greater joys, the greater relationships God has made us for. We need to be planning for growth.
An earlier version of this article was first published in the Star Courier
