head vs. heart

I'm going to continue to quote lyrics to make my points for me. See Death Cab for Cutie's Crooked Teeth:

I'm a war of head versus heart,

and it's always this way.

My head is weak, my heart always speaks

before I know what it will say.

I love this song. I used to think that this directly applied to me, like Ben Gibbard was singing to my soul. I enjoy being a very rational person but of course I have emotions and sometimes I felt like I was just following those instead of my logic. I felt like there were two opposing sides to me: Spock and Kirk, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, Economics and English, and probably most significantly: student and Christian.

But religion isn't all about emotions just like it isn't all about singing songs or making cookies. The real struggle is between the natural self and the supernatural - my nature is to act based on a combination of my changing mood and my logic (which is essentially focused on maximizing utility). That is a terrible natural state to be in! My mood can go haywire at the mention of one word and my logic is really dumb considering the fact that I value my personal utility/comfort/health/pleasure like 10 times higher than anyone else's utility. If I stop listening to my natural self and start listening to something that's more wise than my wisdom and more understanding than my limited scope of emotions - then that's when we're getting somewhere. I'm not just talking about the goodness of my heart, because let's face it, that's pretty self-centered. I'm talking about the Holy Spirit.

When I start listening to him I start making really good decisions because I stop caring about appearing consistent or perfect to other people and I don't have to debate which side of me I should give more weight to. Obviously I still use reasoning and I let compassion motivate me but I should never have to decide between a "rational choice" and an "emotional choice," listening to my head OR to my heart. God can use both of them to show me what to do and in the end they shouldn't have to conflict - listening to the Spirit might not lead me to something that I want to do but it will always lead me to something that I know both in my head AND in my heart is good because it aligns with the nature of God - which is pure goodness.

If you're curious - this is what made me start thinking about this:

1 Corinthians 2:10b-16

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. ¹¹ For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. ¹² What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. ¹³This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. ¹⁴ The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. ¹⁵ The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, ¹⁶ for,

“Who has known the mind of the Lord
so as to instruct him?”

But we have the mind of Christ.