"Heart Like a Wheel"

“Some say the heart, is just like a wheel; once you bend it, it can’t be mended.”

Linda Ronstadt.

When our two oldest kids were 14 and 16 we lived in the country. Coming home from “the city” one day my wife an I began to notice chunks of rubber on the road. ‘Ah, some poor guy is having the retread come of one of his tires,’ I thought. As we got closer to home the chunks became more frequent and then, imagine my surprise when the path of broken tire led right up our driveway. As I pulled into the yard, there was our other car parked in front of the garage jacked up as high as the jack would go and the spare tire was on in place of the original.

It didn’t take long for my 14-year-old son to confess that he’d taken the car for a drive on one of the back roads. He’d lost control, gone into the ditch at such a speed and angle that it forced the one tire off the rear rim and trapped handfuls of grass between the rim and tire on the front.

Then he drove the three kilometres home on the flat tire. Hence the chunks of rubber that we’d seen coming up the lane.

“Don’t worry dad,” he said. “I’m pretty sure the rim can be fixed.”

Well, this is about the time that Ms. Ronstadt wrote her song. "No son, steel wheels that look like a head of cauliflower cannot be mended."

The things is, Linda doesn’t know that faintest thing about what Jesus can do with a heart.

“I will take your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, a heart that is able to love, and I will put a new spirit within you, and you will walk in my laws and keep My commandments and you shall be My people and I will be your God."

There is nothing good in us that would compel Jesus to do this transplant for us. It is His love and Grace always and only that allows for this to take place. As is seen in the case of atheists, our hearts, left to themselves are absolutely inflexible against God. Any where you see a heart that is bent toward God, you can know that a stony heart no longer exists.