God Gave Me My Heart
It's Me, JussKyia | My Personal Blog
JussKyia Lifestyle • jusskyialifestyle.com
I used to think everybody was good.
I am not exaggerating. I genuinely believed that if not everyone, then a solid ninety percent of the people walking around on this earth were good at their core. Like me. I thought they wanted the best for others. I thought they would show up if they said they would. I thought if I treated people the way I wanted to be treated, they would naturally do the same. Not because I was taught that. Because that is how I was wired. It was just in me.
So I moved through life that way. I gave my word and I kept it. If I said I would be somewhere, I was there. If someone needed something and I had it, I gave it. And I did not keep a tab. I did not expect a parade. I just assumed — genuinely assumed — that the people around me were operating the same way. That when I needed them, they would rearrange something for me the way I rearranged for them. Because I meant that much to them. The way they meant that much to me.
That ain't true.
It took me a long time to figure that out. And I mean a long time. Because when people would lie to me or mistreat me, I was not angry. I was confused. Like, wait — that is not what happened. Why are they saying that? And I would go try to set the record straight, and some people would listen, some would not, some did not care either way. And I just kept thinking, I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone.
I lived in that cycle for most of my twenties and well into my thirties. Giving. Trusting. Being confused when the trust was not returned. Trying again. Being confused again. I had no clue what was happening.
And then one day — I honestly do not remember exactly where I heard it — something clicked. Somebody said, or I read, or it just landed in my spirit: human beings are not naturally good. We are not wired for goodness. We are wired for sin. It is our nature to go against God, not toward Him. We do not default to righteousness. We default to self.
And I sat with that. And I believed it immediately. One hundred percent. Because it explained everything.
But then I had to sit with the next part, and this is the part that changed me: if human beings are not naturally good, and I have spent my entire life genuinely operating in goodness — not perfectly, but genuinely — then where did it come from? It did not come from me. It could not have. Because according to the Word, my natural default is sin. My natural direction is away from God. So the goodness I carried into every room, every relationship, every decision — that was not Kyia. That was God.
He gave me my heart.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The heart I operate from, the one that assumes the best, gives without keeping score, shows up when it costs something — that is His heart. Placed in me. Expressed through me. Active in me before I even understood the theology behind it.
The Bible says God knows your heart. He knows your motives. Do you believe in your heart — not in your head, not in your mind, but in your heart? Your heart is your core. Your soul. Your spirit. The truest version of who you are. And the truest version of who I am has always pointed toward God. Not because I was born better than anyone else. I was born with the same sin nature as everyone. But God gave me a heart that He shaped, and He has been expressing Himself through it my entire life.
Here is where it gets real. Even when I sinned — and I did, and I do — even when I made decisions that were not righteous, even when I chose wrong on purpose, God still knew my heart. Not because my sin did not matter. Because my motives were never rooted in evil. I was never plotting. I was never scheming.
I was never making a plan to deceive or destroy someone. My heart, even in its imperfection, was always reaching toward Him. And He knew that. Because He is the one who put that reach in me.
When I started studying salvation and learning what it means that God looks at the heart, everything connected. All those years of being confused about why people did not operate like me — it was because they were operating from their nature. And I was operating from His. Not because I earned it. Not because I deserved it. Because He chose to give me a heart that reflected Him. And I am so grateful for that disposition. I did not create it. I could not have. It is a gift.
So when I say God gave me my heart, I am not being poetic. I am stating what I know to be true after fifty-something years of living in it. Every good thing in me is from Him. Every instinct toward kindness, every impulse toward generosity, every refusal to operate in malice — that is His fingerprint. Not mine. I just happened to be the one He put it in.
And if you are reading this and you recognize yourself in any part of that — the giving, the confusion, the wondering why people do not love the way you love — let me tell you something. That is not naivety. That is God's heart in you. And the world will try to beat it out of you. It will call you foolish. It will take advantage. It will use your goodness as a doorway and then wonder why you are tired.
But do not let them take it. That heart is from God. Protect it with discernment, steward it with wisdom, but never apologize for carrying something the world does not understand. They cannot recognize it because they did not receive it. But you did. And it is the most valuable thing you own.
Because He gave it to you.
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds." — Jeremiah 17:9–10
But God — who searches every heart and knows every motive — gave you the one you carry. And everything good in it points back to Him.
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