Protean Heart

We have been reading the book The Secret of Lying in my reading class for the past few weeks. In the book, a character talks about how she misses writing letters, and she mulls over how people used words like "protean" in the hey day of letter writing. Protean is an interesting word. It means to be "versatile" or "malleable", "changeable in shape or form."

I like that word. I like the meaning behind it. I like the idea of being "changeable in shape or form." I think a lot about how I act and how I am perceived. (Unfortunately, after the fact most of the time.) I think about whether the things that are important to me, are perceived as what is important to me by others, or if the "me" that I project onto the screen of my life is something different and dingy.

I have a trouble coming to a conclusion about that. I am sure it changes day to day. I would like to think that I am becoming a better version of myself everyday; that as I walk through my marriage, my job, my decreasing days, that my eyes become more reflective of my heavenly father's. But, I also know that I have a desperate and needy heart. It has been tamed, corralled as such, and I certainly don't let it lead me into as many poor relationships and poor decisions as I did while doing the growing up. However, there are still shadows of that heart, in my attempts to be funny, my exaggerations, my complainings and annoyances directed towards the people I care most about. I deny myself a thousand crazy thoughts and actions every day. I just wish I didn't have to deny myself those things in the first place. I wish my "protean heart" had been formed into something that was not so prone to wander, prone to reform back into what it was.

So, I like the idea of a "protean heart". Not in the romance novel sort of way, but in the way of my loving father's spirit wrapping itself around it, and changing it into the best version possible--a version that's need TO love and TO reach out, is more dominant that its need to BE loved and its need to have people reaching in to my life. Because those are two very different motivations.