Matters of the Heart

As Valentines Day rolls around marking another manmade, overhyped Hallmark occasion, (sorry, I guess over the years I’ve lost my ability to be a romantic), I am reminded that February is also American Heart Month where our attention is also focused on the issue of cardiovascular health. So while we wear red to draw attention to the importance of heart health and celebrate our romantic interests with bouquets of red roses, there’s another heart issue that stays pretty much hidden as society advances and rolls along. I’ll get to that in a moment.

We all know that our heart is irreplaceable and nothing within our body can continue to work when it stops beating even if we don’t regularly think about it doing its automatic job inside our ribcage. My dad demonstrated just how invaluable the heart is when as a young girl, I walked out of high school one afternoon to see my grandparents sitting in their pickup truck down the street. Puzzled why they felt the need to spare me my mile walk home, as I approached them I instantly could tell something wasn’t right. Dad had been rushed to a hospital over an hour away in an adjoining state, close to death after suffering a massive coronary event.

My dad hadn’t really ever gotten on board with all the hype surrounding heart healthy eating or exercise. He was pretty stubborn like that. Cue black smoke pouring from the kitchen stove as he attempted to crisp up his Rapa scrapple patty every Saturday morning during my Looney Tunes hour. If it was on the grocery shelf, it was meant to be fried up and eaten. Dad’s idea of exercise varied from flipping through the TV channels from his recliner to the occasional stroll from the golf cart to the green.

So when he barely cheated death on that chilly January morning in 1980, there shouldn’t have been a big surprise that his cardiovascular system was a clogged up mess. However, for a 16 year old daddy’s girl who had always thought that her childhood knight in shining armor was invincible, I began to wrestle with more than just a little PTSD while he spent the next month tethered to machines and oxygen tanks.

Post heart attack, after not heeding the cardiologist and vascular surgeon in their recommendations to engage in cardiac rehab, he also refused to take to heart (pun intended) their advice to start getting healthier by eating low sodium, low fat, and from what I can only surmise that my fried-sunny-side-up dad simply heard was “low taste, low enjoyment” diet. So almost twelve years to the month, dad wound up once again on the heart-lung bypass machine a second time. This time not by ambulance but a rather urgent reservation that would include a quadruple artery bypass and an aortic valve replacement. This time it wasn’t lost on me that one of the things that would attempt to save his life would be compliments of another one of his favorite breakfast items—bacon. Yep, my dad was soon going to owe his life to some poor little fetal pig, raised and bred for such a time as this.

Dad and his humor tried to prepare us all for the seriousness of cracking open his ribcage a second time and the extra risk of adhesions from a previous surgery that could add complications that weren’t expected the first time. The night prior to his surgery as my mom and I sat on his bedside listening to the surgeon discuss the procedure one last time, I asked his doctor with hopeful expectancy if this was going to fix him for good. I’m not sure exactly what I meant by that at the time, but I was 28 years old and unbeknownst to me, just a couple of months from finding out that I was pregnant with his first grandchild.

“This valve replacement should add quality to your dad’s life and we are optimistic that he will get ten good years out of it,” the surgeon added with a certainty in his voice as if he had just predicted that the sun would certainly rise in the morning.

“Ten years?” I repeated back, barely audible as I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

“That’s the hope,” he confirmed as his gaze remained locked on me to be sure that indeed I had understood his words correctly.

Dad had recently turned 69 years old. Although I never knew my paternal grandfather, I was acutely aware that my dad had lost his own father to a massive stroke at the same age that he was right then.

The surgeon continued on, highlighting the order of how things would unfold in the morning with dad’s surgery but my attention had been hijacked by the realization that the one person besides God Himself who would be holding my dad’s heart in his hands had deemed his life expiration to be in 10 years.

“Any other questions for me?” The surgeon snapped me back to the realization that now that the pre-op preparations were completed, nothing was left but to try and catch a few zzz’s before the early wake-up call and long vigil of tomorrow.

Lying quietly in the family suite that had been prepared for my mom and me to spend the last hours overnight with my dad, my thoughts became a little more indignant. How could a date be put on my father’s life expectancy? Doesn’t God in heaven number all our years? Nonsense, I finally thought as I drifted off to a fitful few hours of sleep trying to not count how old that would make me when I might lose him to a worn out pig valve that was going to save his life in the morning.

Spoiler alert: my dad breezed through open heart surgery for the second time and did get the full 10 year life expectancy out of that swine donor. To be exact, dad got well over 15 good years post transplant. So much for medical statistics. Unfortunately for my mom who drove him nuts with her nagging, dad continued to fry up things in the kitchen that would nearly alert the fire department located just around the corner.

Dad’s fitness regimen did expand a bit later into roughhousing with his grandkids even though he continued his surfing habit through the golf channel and anywhere John Wayne could be found on the tube.

God, not the highly trained and talented medical team, decided that dad’s beta blocker laced heart would continue to beat approximately 175 million more times than predicted that pre-surgery night. Proving just as I thought, surgeons and experts in the medical field may know an awful lot about all things anatomy, but only God knows how many days each of us actually will have.

Dad passed away in April of 2007, just 4 days before Easter Sunday. He was scheduled to be buried on the Saturday prior because in mom’s family, no one hangs out in the funeral home past three days. But as we also have discovered, man plans and God laughs.

April 7, 2007 woke people on the shore to more than 6 inches of snow. One thing that is important to understand is that Virginia’s Eastern Shore does not get many snow events even in the winter months. Also, I cannot ever remember an April when it snowed. Yes, April and Easter in particular in New York where we had lived prior to moving back down to Maryland, could be blustery where egg hunts got cancelled due to snow covered daffodils, but my little hometown, nestled between the ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, just didn’t call up the few snow plow operators this far into springtime.

So with the help of the funeral director, our family scrambled to reschedule dad’s planting for Easter Monday. God decided that first we would celebrate Christ’s resurrection and then my dad’s. Which really brings me back around to my point of writing about the importance of our hearts.

In Ezekiel 36:26 it is written: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Science has proven that what we think and subsequently translate into our emotions can be as damaging to our health as an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise. Resentment, grudges, unresolved anger, unforgiveness—all of these emotions and actions over time can damage the very thing that keeps us alive.

But it goes beyond medical implications. Do you know that a hardened heart may not have life beyond death? Go ahead, look it up in the Good Book, I’m not making this up. (Mattthew 6:15 is a good place to start—“But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours.”)

A hardened heart not only physically dies off little by little as clogged arteries eventually take their toll from lack of exercise, high fat diets, excess alcohol or bad habits like smoking, but a heart turned away from fully forgiving and letting God sort out the vengeance we so desire, will not receive the forgiveness necessary to have a relationship with God the great Physician and Father and directly impacts our need to also be forgiven of our many trespasses.

One of my earliest memories of my daddy besides the nightly bedtime ritual of “I love you a bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck,” was when he reminded me to turn the other cheek when someone hurt me. As a child, in my limited and immature thought processes, I just couldn’t imagine why I would want to become a bobblehead being smacked back and forth by someone who wanted to hurt me, whether that was by being called an unkind name on the playground or when my younger brother would tear up my favorite toy again. So it didn’t really make much sense at the time but those seeds of wisdom were being planted in my heart from a really early age.

I have to embarrassingly admit that the concept of 7x70 times didn’t completely stick either until sometime recently. Sometimes it takes decades to harvest a good crop off those earlier planted seeds, I suppose. All I can say is thank God that my earthly father had some patience and that my Heavenly Father still does.

You see we can wander through this life thinking that we have forgiven people when in reality we are still carrying around the hurts, insults and upsets of a lifetime. We don’t even recognize the heavy burden around our neck while we show the world just how self righteous and justified in our limited self awareness we have become. That is, until we understand that God has forgiven us from all of our wretchedness—things for which we are aware we need forgiveness as well as things we have buried deeply, hoping that no one will ever discover (hint-God already knows it all)—we can’t seem to grasp just how much fully forgiving others and ourselves is a command and not just a suggestion.

Our heart can’t be healthy and carry us throughout our lifetime purpose if we don’t take care of it, both physically and spiritually. Scrapple and fried eggs here and there won’t sentence us to a life of coronary distress but not seeking to practice forgiveness every day—every hour, every minute—whatever it takes to finally fully release both our offenders and us from the grip of a hardened heart, we damage ourselves both physically and spiritually.

So what does a hardened heart not related to diet or a sedentary lifestyle look like? Well, it can be the lies we tell ourselves that we have forgiven someone for whatever it is they have done yet we still seek to show others that we are justified to continue to feel hurt or offended. It can be the walls we build to keep others out because their words while hurtful and confusing are unacceptable and we are no longer interested in giving that person the opportunity to try and do better. It might be the rage, hatred or anger that we feel whenever we think about that person. It may be the second, third or fourth chances that we are not willing to give our offender that has turned us into both judge and jury and makes us decide that 7x70 really doesn’t apply to us.

I discovered that when anytime my mother-in-law who had been quite hurtful in both actions and words over the many decades of knowing her, was mentioned, a heat would rise up from deep within and could be felt creeping up my neck until it released itself out of my mouth with a rage that ripped open the lid to the Pandora’s box where I had secretly kept all of the many offenses that she had unleashed both knowingly and unknowingly on me. It no longer mattered that I had spent plenty of pleasant times with her—laughing at ridiculous bargains we could find while out yard sale’ing on Saturday mornings, or late night chats long after the kids and husbands had retreated to bed when visiting from out of town, or the women’s Bible study that she brought me to that was the pivotal point in my faith walk, catapulting my relationship with Jesus right before I would walk through the shadow of death with a rare cancer diagnosis with two small children. All of those wonderful things, blotted from my memory, replaced with my seemingly justified anger and hidden unforgiveness at all the things she had said and done that weren’t so pleasant.

Until I recently experienced a very painful journey of realizing that someone very close to me was holding onto hidden unforgiveness, I hadn't yet realized just how much I had remained blinded by my own remaining unforgiveness of my mother-in-law. In actuality, I was simply reaping what I had previously sowed.

Remember earlier when I said that some crops take longer to harvest? Surely some have taken decades. God gave my dad 84 years on this planet, despite all the medical odds against him. His early remimders about the importance of forgiving—seeds planted deep in my little girl heart—took many experiences and years of heartbreak and anguish to fully come to overflowing harvest. But on this overly commercialized day for celebrating love, tucked in the middle of cardiac awareness month, I am grateful for all those whom I have been fortunate to love in my life, for the miracles of modern medicine, and for the truth that God’s gift of forgiveness is a never expiring prescription for a healthy heart that will never run out of refills.