A Change Of Heart Pdf

[Ronald Gruzinsky]

About3 years ago, I had Dr. Tedd Tripp on the Multiply! Youth Ministry Podcast. Our discussion is one I regularly go back to because of the emphasis on heart change instead of behavior modification. We talked about a couple of specific areas as this emphasis on heart change relates to youth ministry. In this article, I want to share some thoughts from that conversation and how it impacts our ministry.

The difference in outcome between a focus on behavior modification and heart transformation is starkly clear. Behavior modification can easily lead to having proud, self-righteous students who are judgmental and do not sense a need for God. Those who are discipled in a way that focuses on transformation of the heart learn to understand themselves and their heart attitudes, and they tend to have a greater sense of how desperately they need the grace of God in their life.

Brian has been in youth ministry for 23 years. He is passionate about communicating truth to young people and the leaders that work with them. Brian loves to play, watch and talk about all kinds of sports. He and his wife Lynn have three awesome teenagers and live in upstate, NY.

Thanks for sharing this. My husband is a pastor. This is a Huge problem especially with the older believers. They judge the outward appearances of the young people. We are seeing so many young people leave churches and declare they are going through the deconstruction of their faith. It is so harmful and causes spiritual harm.

Great point Kristy. It is easy to get off track and start focusing more on morality than true heart transformation. We continually have to preach the gospel to ourselves as a reminder of all that Jesus had done for us.

I caught up with Eddie Espinosa, by way of his cell phone while he strolled the aisles of a Target store in the Los Angeles area, shopping for a Mothers Day present for his mother-in-law. You can imagine the background sounds on the tape of the interview. Eddie is currently an assistant principal at Canyon High School in Anaheim, California.

"The year was 1982. I had been a Christian since 1969, but I saw a lot of things in my life that needed to be discarded. I had slowly become very complacent. I acknowledged my complacency, and I prayed to the Lord, 'The only way that I can follow you is for you to change my appetite, the things that draw me away. You must change my heart!'"

Eddie continued, "Shortly thereafter I was in my car on the way to my work, feeling a desire to draw near to God and with the wrestling still going on in my heart. Suddenly, a melody and some words began to flood through my mind. As I stopped at a stop sign I reached for something to write on. The first thing I found was a small piece of yellow paper, which, by the way, I still have, and began to write as rapidly as I could. It was like taking dictation. I wrote the words on the paper, and kept the melody in my mind."

"Our church home was the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Anaheim, California, and someone told the pastor that I had written a song that would be good for the congregation to sing. The pastor asked me to play it for him, and afterwards asked if I would share it with the congregation. From that point on, I began to get reports that my song was being taught in San Diego, Los Angeles and in many other places."

At the time of this interview, Eddie is a counselor at Orange High School in Orange, California. He also oversees a federally funded program for children. He has written scores of songs with 38 of them being published. As his other duties will allow, Eddie and his wife Else often travel as a team, leading worship music in conferences and special services. They have two children.

The heart I saw my hands holding was a mottled gray and yellow color, a far cry from the animated scarlet mass we all picture inside us. My finger traced the edges of the anatomy we had learned: the coronary arteries that had once provided energy and the thick, muscular walls that sustained billions of contractions during its lifetime. Snapping out of the trance, I passed the heart around to my peers, each waiting patiently for their turn to hold the most important engine ever designed. We spent the rest of the session cutting deeper and deeper, our eyes overwhelmed with the biology fully on display and our minds captivated by the function each structure served in the body. As our time in lab ended, we replaced the heart where we had found it, its once proud walls we met earlier now slashed into disarray by our scalpels. My legs felt heavy as I dragged them along the sidewalk on my walk home, my thoughts arrested by the totality of what I had witnessed.

As I considered this, I shuddered at the prospects of where my initial, flawed line of thinking would take me in the future. A dream come true, my acceptance into medical school gave me the hope of using medicine to change the world, yet I was not even a full year into my medical studies and I had already succumbed to my worst fears. My dream turned abruptly into a sterile reality of considering people as only anatomical structures, detachedly and without consideration for their importance.

It's a little difficult to say much that's relevant about an episode like "Change of Heart," simply because there isn't a whole heck of a lot to say. If I wanted to be incredibly concise rather than stretching this review out to 1,000 words with needless filler, I probably could do so without taking anything away from the big picture.

"Change of Heart" is a pleasant hour of DS9 fluff that features a finale with some poignant relevance. The end result is definitely not opaque and hardly challenging. But at the same time, I think it said some things that needed saying. I've stated on many occasions that Worf and Dax as a couple haven't compelled me mainly because the writers haven't made the relationship ... well, affectionate enough. Much of Worf/Dax has boiled down to clichs with an occasional one-liner or sentiment that works.

Still more filler includes a Runabout flight through an asteroid belt (otherwise known as "DS9 does The Empire Strikes Back"), which was visually neat but not exactly important. And the episode's Quiet Dialog Scenes are simultaneously pleasant, plentiful, and non-essential.

I am, however, going to have to register a minor complaint about the way the plots recently have been teasing with their purports of relevance and rarely carrying through. Such plot pieces almost always have something to do with the DS9 current events, yet they rarely end up having a lasting impact. I was genuinely interested by the kind of intelligence information that Lasaran could've offered to the Federation, but since the main drive of the story was the love versus duty angle, Lasaran's doomed fate was basically never in doubt. I think DS9 needs to return to substantive plotting that adds to the canvas, because such plotting has often been the real strength of the series. We haven't received much "true" story-building material since "Sacrifice of Angels." Sure, there have been a number of interesting little pieces that have dwelled in the background, but I'm beginning to thirst for something that will matter in the long run as well as the short.

There's not much else to say. Overall, this is a transparent episode that doesn't ask you to think much. Then again, love, by nature, isn't really a subject that demands us to think. Not to be completely clichd, but "Change of Heart" is a tale of the heart (and it even has "heart" in the title). On that level it works okay, though it's firmly grounded in the routine.

Paul,

Then you probably don't want to know that Dukat is actually Sisko's father and Kira's his twin sister. Or that Kukalaka is in fact not Bashir's teddy bear, but his sled.

(If it's any consolation, it wasn't much of a surprise during the series' initial run, either - it was pretty common knowledge that Terry Farrell wasn't returning for the seventh season.)

I agree with pretty much everything you say here, Jammer, save for the fact that I'd rate it higher. Not that I'm taking issue; it just illustrates how subjectively people are going to react to a story such as this. Quite simply, I was moved. There was nothing terribly original in the story, but it was performed and directed well enough that the sentiments, however well-worn, felt genuine, and for a story as simple as this, that's probably the best thing it can have going for it.

Actually, this is one of those star ratings that I'd revise if I were to revise long-ago reviews. When I saw this again on DVD a few years ago, I realized it was easily a 3-star episode. It worked much better than I'd remembered.

Well I agree with Charlie on this one: What an episode, if Jadzia had died and Worf would have chosen Duty before his wife and she would have died because of it. It would have had tremendous storytelling opportunities.

I was quite moved by the episode. I for my part always liked Jadzia Dax as a character and was quite fond of her marriage to Worf.

I'll just mention that all modern militaries prohibit husbands and wives from serving in the same chain of command, expressly to avoid the kinds of situations "addressed" by this episode, as I am reminded by constantly by friends and acquaintances currently in service. So for me, I found the plot setup tedious and entirely a writer's conceit, which destroyed any resonance the episode might have had.

I thought this was Worf's best outing since "Way of the Warrior".

He had been written as a stern, grumpy character who was good at fighting and took command of the Defiant now and again. In this episode we get to see Worf having a real relationship with someone. Instead of cliched arguements like we typically see with Dax and Worf, we see Worf willing to compromise, willing to have fun and willing to sacrifice his entire career to save Jadzia's life. If there's one thing that Trek has never done well, it's romantic relationships. But this episode was about as poignant as you can get for a character like Worf.

I agree with Jammer's revision to 3 stars. I don't think it's fair to criticise this episode based on not contributing much to the larger canvas, because there are loads of other standalone episodes. At least this one not only made Worf and Dax's relationship truly convincing for perhaps the first time ever, but it also had a lasting impact on a character by explicitly stating that Worf would not be able to advance his career any further. This makes his future role as an ambassador in "What you Leave Behind" all the more believable, because Worf wasn't going to be a First Officer or a Captain any time soon, if ever.

Unfortunately Star Trek Insurrection and Star Trek Nemesis messed that up by putting him on the bridge of a starship again!

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