open hearts

Let’s just say, last week was not my week. One of my good friends, sister to a songwriter, told me that her sister wrote a song about God’s presence in the midst of a “hellish week” and I think that song was for me. I’ve been wrestling with writing this for some time now, because there are things that need to be shared and things that need to be kept close - and that discernment is crucial. But I also have a pretty bold feeling that some of the things I’ve been working through are not solely my battles. So, at the expense of my own intimate feelings, here is a little candid something that I hope can meet you somewhere too. 

Hearts are funny. They complicate truth and modify behavior and subvert reality so it can get really messy when your brain knows it needs to make the decisions your heart can’t make on its own. That’s a simple way to put what has happened in my own heart as of late. A fervent prayer for clarity about a close relationship was answered with revealed truth I did not expect, and things just came unraveled from there. And while it may have been a painful realization, I have come to realize that God’s kindness can sometimes look hard because ultimately he reveals the things that help us see what we couldn’t otherwise. The answer to our prayer for wisdom is always wisdom - just sometimes in a form we were not expecting. The hard wisdom we need to make hard decisions.

But you know what sucks about hard but right decisions? They are still painful in the aftermath. We tend to think that the right decisions won’t hurt to make, but sometimes they actually hurt more than the wrong ones. 

Important to remember with these things is that hard endings don’t change memories or love. It all happened, it was good when it did, it all grew and stretched and shaped you in ways you wouldn’t be if it never happened. It doesn’t change how much you loved them, that they were your best friend and adventure partner. It doesn’t change what was sacrificed or fought through either, it doesn’t change what was hurtful or hard. And no matter what the ending, you still have permission to grieve what was lost. Because there is pain in the separation of things. The surrendering of shared dreams, the act of untangling what was done together, the process of pulling apart what has been stuck together for so long. It’s kind of a ripping & pulling feeling - and no matter what, this will always be uncomfortable. 

The thing is, people will do or try to convince themselves to believe whatever they can to cope, usually to try to get around the pain. We try to convince ourselves that things didn’t happen, delete them, believe that we didn’t actually care or love, that it all wasn’t as important as it was. But I am finding that the best way to move on is straight through the wilderness, headfirst into the feelings. Trying to find a way around it just makes the journey longer. 

So, heart open, I am taking it on. The feelings as they crash like waves, the frustrations as they bubble up, the tears as they flow. It’s all part of the (annoying-and-frustrating-for-someone-who-is-an-enneagram-8-and-wants-to-be-powerful-all-the-time) process. It’s also just a heart’s job to love, so I can’t really get mad at it for having done its job for so well and for so long, despite how it may have ended. You can fight for things, but you cannot fight for someone else to fight for them too.

This is so much easier said than done. Because losing something that has been a part of your journey for so long, that has shaped you, encouraged you, challenged you, refined you - will always be important. No matter what happens now, nothing takes that importance away, nothing changes what was felt in those moments or expressed in those days, nothing has the power to actually go back and change what it was when it happened - the great love that was there, the great fun, the great care and even the great hardship. The effort put in, the time, the travel, the sacrifice. So maybe we need to stop thinking that to move forward with things we have to forget they happened. Maybe, the best way to move forward is to know and be thankful that they did.

And so, I thought this was it for my “hellish week”, but then, a few nights later, I got a shaky phone call from my mom, informing me that my dad needed to have emergency open heart surgery. There I was, inconveniently coffee shop crying again, wondering how on earth this was happening too. All in the same week. Coffee shops in New York are rather small, so the woman next to me, hearing the entire thing, continued to glance at me in concern. 

Side-note: concern for strangers in a city that is so individualistic is rather refreshing, I do have to say. 

Anyway. We found out that my dad had major blockage in his arteries, and would need emergency surgery. A pretty wild procedure where they take veins out of other places in your body and attach them to your heart, essentially bypassing what is clogged. 

What was strange however, was as I sat there in that coffee shop in shock, peace (of all things) flooded over me. God’s kindness - I remembered. God’s kindness looks like finding out things that are so hard, ultimately so we can fix what needs to be fixed. There is actually kindness in all that stuff being revealed in his heart because had we remained not knowing, worse may have happened. Not too dissimilar from what had happened earlier that week, in a much less physical way. 

And so, I flew home to California, spent the week in and out of the hospital, trying to reconcile how there can be so many heart things we never see going on inside some of the people closest to us. And in the midst of nursing my own heart, and without the person who would have been by my side had this happened any earlier, I had to step in and be there for my family as doctors nursed my dad’s. It was scary, surgery is never fun or easy to recover from, especially one where they have to take your heart from your body and repair it. The aftermath of that was hard to watch, and it is hard to see someone you love in so much pain. But God promises not just restoration, but to make things new and better than they once were. When something breaks or is not healthy, He actually makes it stronger than it once was, fortifying it through pain. If we want to be stronger, we sometimes have to be hurt for a while so we may not be harmed in the long run. 

Somehow I have already seen beauty brought from all of this. Relationships that have come out of the woodwork and become the most life-giving. People coming to just sit at the hospital, even though there is nothing to do, understanding that the ministry of presence is sometimes just all there is. Thank you to all of you who have prayed and presence-d me and my family in this time. 

Sometimes hearts have to be opened, in some way or another, to be fixed, to be made stronger. We are still healing. Time heals - but it’s a myth to think that time and time alone will do the job. Time with intentionality towards recovery will heal. Time itself spent avoiding things will only make it worse. So I am giving time and grace and intention to my heart, and so is my dad. Taking that pain and those feelings head on, feeling ourselves getting stronger, and ultimately, believing it is the will of a good God to make us better than we once were.