The Heart of Life

Last night I got to see my very first heart transplant.

I think that I'm still feeling the rush and the high from the experience. It was exhilarating, to say the least, and I'm still having so much difficulty formulating into words what I was feeling as I was watching this group of men and women go in and literally take a heart out of a person's body.

Several hours later when they finally got the entire heart removed, one of the doctors invited me to come and "play with it." She picked the heart up and began explaining to me its various valves and compartments. She had me feel the thickness and the strength of the muscles. She showed me the grafted arteries from a previous CABG. And then she left me to examine it on my own. As I stood there, poking and prodding that heart, it all felt so surreal. It was so bizarre to think that the very organ which had kept this man alive and running for the past 58 years, was now weakened to the necessity of replacement and was there, in my hands, giving out its last few beats.

The experience really blew me away and I have since been thinking about that heart, about my heart, and about the heart of God. I can't seem to shake myself of it.

It's kind of funny that these past couple of months I've really felt God leading me to become a student of His heart and to trust in His promise of a new heart and then that he would afford me the opportunity to get to see a heart transplant live and in action. I can't help but wonder if it's God's way of trying to tell me something or of trying to encourage me or motivate me, but whatever His reasoning, it sure is heavily weighing itself upon me.

What is it to truly know the heart of God? To know that He is the creator and the sustainer and the pursuer of my own heart? What is it to trust in His promise of a new heart?

"And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh... You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God." -Ezekiel 36:26,28