I stood at the counter in my kitchen this morning and made coffee and thought about hearts.
About the things of this world that so quickly go to
conversations of the heart.
Sometimes the most dynamic thoughts of the entire day come
to me when I’m standing there in the quiet, early morning, in the few seconds
when I anticipate the coffee. When the
coffee is poured, I am suddenly in the mood for writing. A few short blinks later, and it is time to
get ready for school. And I’m ushered into
the business of teaching, and any quiet thought while pouring the coffee comes
back sparingly. But the common trend is
that the mornings always help my little heart.
Yesterday at school I showed the students This Day in History
online…it’s what we do for a birthday… and one of the stories talked about the
first pacemaker that was put into a person.
He lived for 112 days with this first artificial heart. And there it was, on the screen…they showed
the chest cavity being opened and this machine being put inside. Just for a second. My students gasped. I stared at it, and felt, once again, this
profound gratitude that I’m not in charge of medical procedures. And this amazement at the actual look of this
process. You hear about pacemakers. You hear about recovery. You do not hear about the moment when they
lower the heart into the body.
Hearts can mean so many different things. It can mean a pacemaker, or the things in the
margins on the homework I am grading, which is the common doodling practice of
some of my middle school girls.
It can mean Valentine’s Day, or how you reference the
goodness of falling in love, or anxiety which makes it race in your chest. Or, in contrast, the beating of your heart
that tells you that the exercise has paid off and that you are strong.
I think you can look at it in a lot of ways. It’s this muscle beating a rhythm inside of
you your whole life long, or this abstract idea pertaining to the self.
Heart can be what you sing about, what you do or don’t
listen to, what you’re encouraged to not forget about. It can be linked to the mind or the soul or separated
from it. It can be mocked or
glorified. Put into poetry. Manipulated.
Healed.
Your heart is always beating. Isn’t that astonishing? Before you were born, it was beating, and it
will be one of the last things to fade when you die. You can listen to the heartbeat of other
people, and you feel that you know them. Babies hear the heartbeat of their mother
louder than most everything else, for the entire time they’re in utero. Such a significant way to start a life. We’ve all been there, and that is a lovely,
often forgotten thing. The business of
life catches us and carries us to tasks.
But before any of that, before everything else that we ever experienced,
we heard a heart.
Today I heard a quote that moved me and stirred me up inside.
It considered the work of your life and
what it creates.
‘When
someone can present it (your work) in a way that is inviting someone into your
joy – that’s when the most beautiful things are formed.’
–
Josh Garrels
I think most would agree that they want to see the beauty of
life. And I think these beautiful things
are connected to the heart. Both the physical
elements and things that are emotional and spiritual too
The heart pounding in your chest tells you about your world
and how you’re living in it – wherever you go, whatever you do. It’s a timepiece that we don’t think about
when we only hear the clock.
But the heart is linked to the spiritual and emotional parts
of living too. When you say your heart
is stirred by something beautiful. When
you feel joy. When you talk about things
in your world that are measure change and highlights of your life story. When you share the very best of yourself
with everyone around you.
December? Snow so
suddenly upon us? The Advent season and
hope of Jesus? It’s a good
time for more
of this in the daily perspective of my life.
Right now, more than ever, I choose to pay the most attention to hearts.
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