Is Your Heart In the Right Place?

Staying in the center of God’s will, no matter where you are.

Photo by R Mo on Unsplash (edited)

Kimberly Phinney

is a writer, professor, editor, counselor, and the founder of The Way Back to Ourselves literary community and journal. Her writing has been featured in Christianity Today, Ekstasis, Fathom, and more. She is the author of two poetry collections, Of Wings and Dirt and Exalted Ground.

In 2023, I learned one of the biggest lessons of my life about the sovereignty of God through life-altering circumstances. While I was knee-deep in battling critical-turned-chronic illness, I was faced, unexpectedly, with the battle of trying to keep my job and preserve my reputation with a community I once called home.

In the maelstrom of loss, I was convinced that my position, which I had held for nearly a decade as the English department head of a Christian school, was the most important thing to God. This school was a place where I sacrificed so much of myself, a place where I answered God’s call on my life and cultivated a deep-rooted community I deeply loved. It was where I finally had my miracle baby, and now, at six years old, it was the only school my daughter knew.

My husband and I spent many nights in tears, searching for God’s will in these painful circumstances. Do we do this or do that? Do we stay here or go there? Do I quit or persevere?

I was convinced I needed to prove my character, loyalty, and excellence despite my continued health problems and disparagement from others. I thought God wanted me to fight the good fight—in that particular role, at that particular school, with these particular students—as a faithful force in a sea of change and uncertainty.

After all, this is where God wanted to keep using me, wasn’t it?

I also believed I needed to keep my position so my daughter could stay in the only place she had ever known, with her friends, teachers, and familiar routines. She had already endured enough trauma with her mother’s near-death experience with sepsis, stage four endometriosis, and post-surgical complications.

We had lost so much, so how could we bear losing more, God?

After continued heartbreaking circumstances, my husband was no longer convinced that this position was good for our family. He asked me one night in complete exasperation, “What if we just let it all go?” Of course, I didn’t want to hear it. I was so focused on where I thought God wanted me to be that I couldn’t see what God wanted to do in me—in us. But God wanted our shattered hearts, not our fight. And more, he wanted me to meet him in my future instead of clinging to my past. Still, I wasn’t willing to let it go.

Instead, I was adamant my job was where God’s sovereignty was, and that without it, I wouldn’t be able to do Kingdom work for him. I tied God’s goodness to a location, and I had allowed my blind allegiance to an institution to keep me from the deep work God wanted to do in my heart and for my family.

My job had become my identity.

Have you been there before?

So many times, we fret over whether something we are doing is really in God’s will or not: “Do I take this job or that job?” we ask ourselves. “Do I move here or move there?” “Do I do this or do that?” “Do I say yes or say no?”

But what if our lives and faith-walk with God didn’t have to be fraught with this sort of binary overthinking? What if there was a third way of being, where pressures ceased and peace was more abundant—wherever we might find ourselves?

What if I told you that sometimes God actually cares less about our physical locations than he does about our heart positions?

We can see God’s sovereignty and care for our hearts in the Bible. In 1 Samuel 16:7, at David’s anointing, Samuel made it clear that God was not interested in David’s lowly place in his family as the youngest and smallest son or his humble vocation as a shepherd boy. Instead, God chose David to be the future king of Israel because of the position of his heart. Samuel spoke, “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

David wasn’t perfect by any means, but he proved to be “a man after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22). Sometimes, David failed to make the right decisions, but at every turn, he was met with God’s sovereignty because God had David’s heart. And through this, David’s circumstances were blessed and redeemed.

We see this idea of location versus heart position with the story of Jonah, too. This time, God used location to shape Jonah’s heart position twice. First, he cast him into the belly of the whale—not because that’s where God wanted Jonah, but because God used this unsavory location for his good; he used it to reorient Jonah’s heart position toward him. In Jonah 2, we see a contrite man, as Jonah cries out in prayer to the Lord: “For You cast me into the deep, Into the heart of the sea… The waters surround me, even to my soul… Yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God… I will pay what I have vowed” (Jonah 2:3-9).

Once Jonah responded to the voice of God with an obedient heart, God released him from the crucible of the whale, so that he could answer his calling at Nineveh. Then, shortly after God extended mercy to the people of Nineveh after Jonah’s warnings, God used the wilderness east of the city, where Jonah fled to lament, to instruct Jonah about his unmerited kindness toward mankind in the face of Jonah’s struggles with self-righteousness.

In both Bible stories, we see how God works in and through all kinds of places and locations that are not ideal or what we would have chosen, in order to work on the most important position of all: the orientation of our hearts toward him.

Truth be told, I did finally quit my job, but it wasn’t on my terms. I was pushed out with an ultimatum that my failing body could not uphold. So, in the ninth hour, I “let it all go” and resigned. Shortly after that, I collapsed in my classroom, and we learned that I was seriously ill again. I became bedridden and lost my ability to walk for a third time as I waited six months for a fourth surgery.

At an all-time low, I was forced to face what I believed about my place in the world, God’s sovereignty, and the state of my withering heart. In the battle for my job, the cacophony of stress involved was far too loud for me to recognize God’s still, small voice and the redemptive plans he had for my family and me in our suffering story. I was in no place to receive his unbelievable goodness because I was engaged in a battle over a location, a temporal position in my life, all because I believed the wrong things. God’s sovereignty and goodness aren’t in one place or tied up in one outcome. God’s sovereignty is with us as his beloved children, and it goes before us because he is “the Alpha and Omega” (Revelation 22:13).

I didn’t do God’s work all those years because a particular school allowed it. They didn’t hold the keys to the Kingdom. God did! I was allowed to do good work there because God is with me, and he is everywhere, just waiting for our hearts to align with his will. So, whether I put pen to paper, fold the laundry, care for my daughter in the quiet and unseen hours of motherhood, or speak to thousands on a podcast or teach my college students online, God’s will is there because he has my heart, which is healing day by day.

And if any of these circumstances change abruptly, unwillingly, or even intentionally, his goodness will be there too, because his concerns aren’t solely about the outcome; his concerns are about our heart’s position in the things we are doing—wherever that may be.

As I suffered in my sickbed and grieved the end of my teaching career, I finally allowed God to perform heart surgery, like he did for David and Jonah. He showed me that losing my job was for my family’s ultimate good. He showed me that sometimes our ideals or personal beliefs must die so that we can be resurrected in his will and likeness, more and more. He showed me I was operating from a scarcity mindset, rather than from his abundance.

And true to form, God slowly worked to make me whole again—no longer as an extension of my career or location in the world—but as his child, with whom he still wanted to do good work. But this time, it would be in a new and surprising capacity: as writer, professor, doctoral student, and founder and community leader. Yes, my teaching had reached hundreds of students each year, by God’s grace, but today, my writing and community work have reached a thousandfold. God also kept his hand on our daughter, providing a new school closer to home where she is thriving more than ever.

Through all of this, I have learned that the questions and conversations we have with God should be different. Instead of fretting, “Should I take this job or that job?” or “Should I go here or go there?” maybe we should ask, “God, will you please be with me and keep my heart attuned to you, whatever the outcome or wherever I go?” And “God, will you keep reminding me that whatever my next step is, you will be there, too?”

Maybe we pray this: “God, help me sense what the wise decision might be with the information I have now. But more importantly, God, please help me see that you are sovereign, and regardless of the outcome, you are in it because you are working on my heart in all situations, and you can use all conditions to grow me for your good.”

The truth is simple, though we often forget it and most certainly overcomplicate it: We worship an infallible God, so his goodness is far more abundant than we can dream. It cannot be contained by a set of circumstances. God wants our hearts, first and foremost. And when we give him our hearts because we believe in his sovereignty, we learn to trust God wherever we find ourselves.