and How God Fills them All
"Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me"
Psalm 51:10
So....surprise! Your heart is pretty gross. And not just in the whole blood and guts makeup of the whole thing - but you know....that other nasty stuff that enters and corrupts it; I'm talkin' 'bout sin, folks.
When our son, Luca, was 18 months old, we were told that he had a "muddy-sounding" heart on one of his exams. As a matter of fact, it was only an eczema check from his skin doctor of all places, but the doctor was puzzled how I hadn't heard that before of my son.
"You ARE aware of his murmur, right?" asks the doctor.
Puzzled, I reply, "Uh....no."
The doctor swiftly walks across the room and listens to my son's heart again.
"Hmmm" he says to himself.
Without another word he leaves the room, door left open, and returns shortly with a digital stethoscope - something I never even knew existed.
After listening carefully again he says, "Your son, without a doubt, has a significant murmur. I am going to request an urgent appointment for you with the pediatric cardiologist within the week."
We were floored. Not my son, of course - he had no idea what was going on. But "We" as in the family, WE were floored. This was nothing we had ever heard about before, and now we are on the way to this appointment that we never knew we needed.
The pediatric cardiologist, after performing an echocardiogram and studying his heart closely for LITERALLY THREE HOURS, explains that Luca not only has one congenital heart defect, but two. Two.
For those of you that don't know, our hearts are pretty big deals. They are pretty important to take care of our ENTIRE body, our blood, our circulatory system, everything. They need to be able to withstand the pressure of increased speed and force when excited or anxious, it needs to be able to slow down - bit not too much of course - when we sleep or are underwater and swimming - and it also needs to help bring oxygen to all of our blood and our organs and help REMOVE the waste from our bodies by aiming it towards our lungs. They are a super big deal! No one would ever want to hear that their child's , arguably most important body part, is in jeopardy.
As a matter of fact- this is where our devotional comes in, friends.
If your daughter or son or husband or wife or best friend or neighbor had a life-threatening heart defect that you knew about, you would want to do everything that you could to make sure that their heart would be taken care of and that they would get the best medical care as possible. And if it were your child, you may even spend countless nights watching them sleep, gently moving the hair from their eyes as they slumbered, and praying to God that He would make things right. You might pray to God when you see your child running and getting out of breath, praying that his heart is strong - and having to kill your anxieties over and over in order to really put your trust and faith in the Lord. You might do these things, because I did these things.
But the truth is, friends, that we all have this same heart defect. It's called sin and it rots us to our very cores - corrupting and defecting our hearts to the point of death - eternal death as a matter of fact. And our hearts, in the emotional state, are always yearning to fill these voids with SOMETHING - we WANT to feel better - we want to make our friends or loved ones feel better - and we forget that the only and best thing we could ever fill them with is Jesus - He is the answer to everything, but instead we often look to anything BUT Jesus on a regular basis.
And you know - we just found out that the Lord DID decide to heal one of Lucas's holes - his VSD - his muscular tissue that had a hole in it - the Lord healed that for Luca and answered our prayers - but He didn't have to do that. He chose to do that. Because He knows and remembers at all times that this isn't our forever home, so we don't yet need a forever heart.
Remember guys, when you feel your heart swell with pride in the emotional sense, or beat with excitement in the physical, that God created that beautiful instrument inside of you - He created you and is the one that is able to heal your broken heart, physically and emotionally, and the one to completely enter and fix it - eternally.
God totally loves you, all the time.