Day 1: What are you actually being asked to do?

THIS WEEK

Before anything changes, you have to see what is actually there. 

That is the whole purpose of this first week. Not to fix anything, not to perform anything, but to observe. The heart is a busy place, and most of what moves through it runs beneath conscious awareness. Desires form, motives operate, hopes settle into particular shapes, and we rarely pause long enough to notice what is actually happening or where it is coming from. This week creates that pause. 

You will begin by orienting yourself toward God as the center of everything this pathway is about. From there, you will spend the rest of the week turning honest attention toward your heart specifically, the desires and purposes and hopes and the sense of alignment or fracture between who you are and who you are becoming. 

Proverbs 4:23 frames this week’s work with unusual directness. 

Keeping the heart requires vigilance, which assumes the heart does not keep itself. Things drift in. Things quietly reorient around something other than God. The springs of life that flow from a heart kept in alignment with Him are real, and so is the gradual silting up that happens when the spring gets neglected. This week is about honest attention, not the kind that produces shame, but the kind that precedes any real formation. You cannot tend what you have not yet seen. 

There is no right answer to any of these prompts. The goal is accuracy, not impressiveness.