I read something about prayer this morning that will probably stick with me for a while. It basically said that prayer is like being lifted onto the shoulders of Christ so that we see the world as He sees it. This is fun for me because of the imagery of getting to be on someone’s shoulders is not something that I often get to experience. Usually I am the giver versus the recipient of shoulder top views. I used to love it when my four year old used to ask to go “up high”. Of course if you know my son you know he would never be content with just seeing the world from “up high”…without fail, shortly after getting on my shoulders he would fling himself back and then he was able to see the entire world up-side down from up high. His perspective changed drastically in multiple ways by being “up high” with daddy.

And maybe that is what is meant for us through prayer and devotion to God. Although I realize I just used this passage of scripture recently in another post I can’t help but come back to it. Philippians 2:5 puts it this way, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus”* And being who I am, I wasn’t content to just let the text sit. The Greek word for mind in the text is actually developed from a root word that is more commonly used for the heart. So in other words, part of the mission of the Christian life is to have our hearts transplanted with the heart of Christ. What a metaphor!

I am not sure if you have ever heard stories about transplant patients and some of the weird things that happen after their transplants but I always have loved these stories. All of a sudden a person who has never liked Cheetos can’t get enough because the donor from whom they were given life was a Cheetos fanatic. That’s a simple example, but I have even heard about them being much more complex and intricate. Maybe that is how it works with the heart of Christ. Maybe when His heart is transplanted into our bodies we find ourselves wanting to affect and love on people we never wanted to be around before. Maybe we start caring about affecting societal ills that never seemed to bother us before. Maybe this is what it means to be transplanted with the heart of Christ.

So I think about my son’s request to go up high…maybe we should be asking this of our Father more often so that we take on the heart of His Son as we are given a new heart through seeing things in a new way.

* Not entirely why, but I love the King James Version for this text.