Her Heart

Preface

I have learned that God loves you very much and follows you wherever you go. So whatever activity we engage in, whether positive or negative, innocent or sinful, our Heavenly Father, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit is there. When you are loving your bride, God is there, and when you are fighting your bride, God is there. I have a positive memory as a Catholic attending grammar school a long time ago when I read Genesis and said to God in prayer, “Lord, I found the source of all the problems in the world. You changed us.”

At that time, Genesis 3:7 did strike me as the source of all our earthly problems. I often watched war movies and news with my dad in the evenings, and I knew from the Bible that the Fall of Adam was the reason for so much of the death I saw. Scripture seemed to be telling me that before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, everything was good, and God was happy. It was not until they ate the wrong fruit that all the bad things we have to live with on earth became a reality. I thought about how I used to sweat on hot days and freeze on winter days and how the temperature before the Fall of Adam was always perfect. I wondered whether I would like that. I did not understand much about God then. Still, I knew that in a God-created perfect world, you could be perfectly comfortable wearing a light windbreaker jacket in a blizzard or a down coat walking in the Sahara on a scorching day. Let me know when you understand that!

Believing in the power of God and that God answered prayer, I simply asked God to forgive us and make us all like Adam and Eve before the Fall. As a fourth-grader who didn’t understand the sin involved, I asked God, “If our bodies were good before, and there was no problem, why don’t You do what You did before and make us have the bodies and non-sinful nature Adam had before his fall? Especially since You felt that was good. Problem solved!” No response from God to that question, and I continued my life.

More than fifty-five years later, and the reason my memory above is positive, I learned that God does answer all prayers and questions. Yes, Adam and Eve’s physical bodies and hearts were perfect when God first created them, but I learned that we had a sinful nature since their fall. The Holy Spirit told me that thanks to our Father’s work, the eye-opened fallen bodies and hearts of Adam and Eve were perfect for their new life outside the garden and God’s purpose for us today.

The statement I made in prayer to God was not full of extraordinary knowledge or wisdom. It may have been my ability to observe the obvious, or perhaps it is just my internal mother provided natural ability to ask or take on a unique point of view. In truth, for a long time I was as clueless as everyone else on the heart of women until the Holy Spirit filled me with knowledge after my marriage. In one moment, it was an understanding greater than my brain could handle, and I had to type it all down. My first book was on how to give agape love. Although this book also touches on agape love, its purpose is to give male readers the reason for agape love.

The Holy Spirit used all my life experience to help explain agape love. My statement to God reveals a biblical understanding of the human heart before the Fall and after the Fall. Today it should be obvious which is better. It reveals a want and need for all of us to go back to the original state of heart we had before our individual fall. Successful use of the book you’re reading may require going back to reread parts or the whole, and taking time to meditate on the words just as you meditate on the Bible. Her Heart goes deeper than my previous book, How to Pick Your Bride and How to Keep Her for Life, and focuses on the goal of understanding your bride. You chose her, but you don’t know her. You may find yourself saying, “I don’t understand her. Why is she the way she is? What are her secrets?” The truth is, even she may not know. But the answer is in Her Heart—the heart of your bride.

Your own original heart’s desire is to save, to be the hero—to be like Jesus. Don’t be afraid to ask for help from your pastor or a group of like-minded brothers in a church. Pursue your bride with precision acts of agape and with biblical understanding of her heart, the way Jesus is pursuing your heart. Persistent application is the key.