2 Chronicles 16:9 · World English Bible
For Yahweh’s eyes run back and forth throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. You have done foolishly in this; for from now on you will have wars.
His seeing sweeps the whole earth, looking for one thing, a heart made whole toward Him. The king's fault was trusting his own arrangements, leaning on human strength while those very eyes were already searching to help him.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by 2 traditions.
SUFISM
His seeing sweeps the whole earth, looking for one thing, a heart made whole toward Him. The king's fault was trusting his own arrangements, leaning on human strength while those very eyes were already searching to help him.
That reliance is a quiet pride, certain it can secure itself alone. The cure is to let the heart be single and lean where the strength actually is. For that gaze is not a distant patrol but nearness itself, holding and strengthening every undivided heart it finds.
SELF-HELP
Strength gets delivered wherever a person is wholly aimed, which is why a hedging heart feels underpowered everywhere.
A whole heart is an aim before it is a virtue, and the roving eyes of Yahweh are a supply line that runs to whatever the aim points at. Divided attention does not halve the result, it forfeits it, because a man facing two directions arrives at neither with his full weight behind him.
A man who once stood in front of an impossible army with nothing but reliance later bought an alliance with temple silver, and the wars that follow are less a penalty than the standing condition of a man who now solves things by hedging. Once purchase becomes the answer, every new threat requires another one. Hedging costs a person the certainty it was bought to protect.
Sufism lens
Where are you hedging because you do not trust what is already holding you?
The one who is whole and does not scatter himself is the one who holds together. Division, not weakness, is what undoes a person.
A mind gathered into one place is steady. A mind split between things is pulled apart by them.
The rabbis call prayer the service of the heart, and ask for kavanah, the heart actually directed. Words said while the heart is elsewhere are only a shell.
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Sufism
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