King of hearts

It’s been a while since I’ve posted…it’s been a while since I’ve felt like I had anything to say, or that it mattered. I come today literally on the light rail…it’s been a while since I’ve done this too. I come immediately after a test in anatomy, which I am amazed to say, I didn’t stress out over…not once. Anyway, the test was over the physiology of the blood and heart, so that’s what I want to talk about.

Somehow over time, by some power of linguistics that I am completely unable to understand, we as a society and I think as a world have developed two types of meanings of the word “heart”. We could take it in the literal sense, as in the actual organ in your chest that is keeping you alive; or a more common use of the word is a more spiritual sense that corresponds with the word “soul”. And yet another sense of a “heart” is the symbolic representation of love….wow you gotta love the English language for having one word mean so many things. Anyway, I’m going to talk about hearts today, it may be long cuz I have a lot of juices flowing in my brain, so we’ll see how it goes!

So about a week ago in my anatomy lab, I held a human heart in my hands. Obviously it wasn’t alive, it was a cadaver, but still it made me think… I thought of the lyrics to Phil Wickham’s “Safe.” It says “you will be safe in His arms, you will be safe in His arms, cuz the hands that hold the world are holding your heart.” Now, I’m pretty sure he wrote this lyric in the spiritual sense that I mentioned earlier, but right now I want to picture this physically…our hearts, literally our live, beating hearts in God’s hands. Think of what the heart does…it pumps the blood throughout our body to nourish it, to really supply our physical bodies with life. Clinically, you are pronounced dead when your heart stops…biblically, “the life of a creature is in the blood…” (Lev 17:11). Thus, we can conclude that the heart=life...So I picture my heart in God’s hands, with Him squeezing it every time it pumps, every squeeze a gift, an act of love, giving me life. I think of when I would hold my mom’s hand growing up, every time she would squeeze my hand 3 times…it was her way of saying “I love you”. That’s what I think of when God pumps our hearts; He gives us life to show us just how much He loves us.

Now apart from the physical, He still holds our lives in His hands. He holds our hearts and our souls and our lives. So, along with the sqeezing, I see Him sort of cradling our hearts as protection and comfort. The Bible says He is our refuge, our safe place. Psalm 46:1 "God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble." It also says numerous times that we can find peace and comfort in the Lord and that He has a plan for our lives. Psalm 48:14 "For this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end." In holding our hearts, He also gives us strength Psalm 73:26 "My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." All of these and so much more are evident as Christ is in our lives, holding our hearts (souls). I find this completely refreshing :)

Moving on, as I stood there with that heart in my hands all preserved with chemicals and dead (sorry to be blunt), I thought, that’s just it…its dead. The whole purpose of a heart is to give you life, but without blood and without a heartbeat, this heart had a limited purpose. All that it could do was teach me the anatomy of the heart; I couldn’t learn how it works without seeing it in action, all I could learn is where each part of the heart was. It’s like that with God. Allow me to explain, before we follow Christ, we are dead in sin; our hearts are simply that of a cadaver. Our purpose in life is limited, our knowledge in life is limited without Christ. Through Christ our heart beats, through Christ we have life and purpose and knowledge and love and peace and the list goes on… Looking at from researcher’s view, at one point in time they had to analyze a beating heart in order to understand how it works. These people are able to be enlightened through observing a living heart, just like we need Christ to truly understand this life and gain knowledge of the truth. We are alive in Christ, His spirit lives in us so that we may truly live, our hearts are beating through Him.

And of course, hearts are symbolic of love...how this has come to be, I don't know, but I'm guess it was catapulted with the invention of Valentine's day... anyway if you didn't know by now, God's love is pretty spectacular, nay stupendous, nay indescribable! To literally sacrifice your son for a bunch of sinners...I mean, thats huge! I find it interesting that sometimes we settle for earthly love, love that is tainted and short-lived. Now obviously I'm not saying that love is a bad thing, I mean I firmly believe that God placed us on this earth to be in relationship with each other and that he has someone planned for me who I will one day fall in love with and spend my life with (I am indeed a romantic)...I just feel like sometimes we let our physical earthly love get in the way of our view of God's love, we put our trust in human beings rather than God. And I think, no I know cuz I've been there, that this leads to a tremendous amount of hurt in the end. This creates heartbreak which again has both physical and emotional ties to the heart. Not only is a broken heart an emotional feeling, but there are indeed physiological effects. Now, I consider these effects to be in the heart but obviously there are many systems at work. Its similar to the feeling you get when you are anxious or stress, the pain in your chest as your heartbeat increases and your breathing gets harder. It's not fun but it definitely shows that the Lord's love far outweighs the heartbreak we find when we put our trust in humans.

His love never fails as He is holding our hearts :)