Heart.

I have two stories for you on losing and finding heart, and they both occurred over the last couple days. One a physical heart, the other an emotional heart.

My father-in-law is 85 and his health has been dicey for a while, but the doctors assured him that his heart was strong. They were wrong. When his blood pressure fell by half, a trip to the ER showed that his heart was in crisis and needed a pacemaker, but they couldn’t find an artery strong enough to take it. Eventually, a specialist tried a bold, risky procedure… and it worked! He is at home recovering now.

While Kellie was at a Greensboro hospital with her dad, I was literally half-way around the world to care for a dear friend with the other kind of broken heart. A tragedy followed by despair led him to try to hurt himself, and he almost lost his life. I have spent the last few days trying to pour some love and healing back into his soul. It’s a day-by-day fight for heart. Sometimes his heart rises, the next hour it fades, and I wonder how he will ultimately decide to write his story.

As I’ve shared before, we don’t really live in our lives directly; instead, we live in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. We assign meaning or value to certain experiences and call them good. And then we have the hard stuff and sometimes struggle to assign meaning to those parts of our story. So we write those flawed parts into our identity (“I’m the faller in our family.” You may remember that line from the movie About Time), or we write those circumstances into our story as blame (“It was another person’s fault”), or we write it into a chaos theory on life as a whole. Alternately, we write suffering into our story as redemptive.

Over a year ago, I wrote a post on “Falling”—on how the entrance to the True Life of the Spirit (what Rohr calls the second half of life) seems to only get accessed for most of us by a major trauma or loss in life. I know… that’s not a great “hook” for selling a blog! On the other hand, knowing what to expect as a young adult, and knowing how to interpret the losses of life as a not-so-young adult, do offer some crucial perspective. When we resist the experience of falling and can’t find a way to rewrite loss into a redemption story, it comes at a high price.

It comes as the cost of our Heart.

This is a timely perspective as we deepen our experience of Lent this year. Lent mirrors the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness facing the three crucial temptations of what it means to be human, and this time of testing was truly a fight for heart. At his weakest, Jesus received the grace to take up his truest self and carry that heart-fueled self into his calling. Let’s do the same, you and me!

In many ways, our lives orbit our hearts, and the story of finding heart and losing heart lies at the crux of the plot. Just look back over the last month or two, and journal your thoughts on these questions. It’s sort of a fresh casting of St. Ignatius’ Daily Examen…

growing the soul

  • What recent events, conversations, or relationships have helped you take heart?

  • What recent events, conversations, or relationships have caused you to lose heart?

  • Spend some time writing down how these experiences have impacted you and how you think God might be using both losing and finding heart to tell an increasingly good story in your life?

serving the world

  • In what recent situation have you been able to help someone else take heart?

  • Don’t be afraid to also name a situation when you contributed to someone losing heart. Might there be a way to make amends?

  • Now talk to God about these situations. What does your heart want to say?


takeaway

Tend your heart.

Jerome Daley