Heart Monitor

 

My husband’s recent adventures have brought into our lives many marvels of technology – CT scans, ultrasounds, tiny cameras which can roam around inside a body and report to a large screen, pressure socks, automatic dispensing pumps, blood tests which can read levels of salt, sugar, platelets, white cells, iron. When those amazing tools were operated by a qualified doctor or technician, I was awed and thankful.

In the hospital, he had a heart monitor with wires all over his body, which reported to the nurses’ station. Occasionally, that report brought down a team of concerned individuals to his bedside. The cardiologist decided he needed to wear a heart monitor for 30 days. And I was the one designated to operate it. I was not awed and thankful; I was dismayed and apprehensive, but mostly terrified.

As it turns out, it is a small device, there are no wires and it’s simple to use. It came with directions in a written manual.  A tiny monitor on his chest reports to a cell phone on his belt which sends data to some unknown (to us) entity in Houston. We know only one detail which it reports; the monitor probably sends a great many details about his heart which we neither know nor understand. The cardiologist will figure out what all that means. We are expected to report to the cell phone menu any obvious external symptoms, such as shortness of breath, dizziness and the like.

 I’m not terribly imaginative; you really have to set things right in front of me and explain them, preferably in writing. Well, this experience has done so. Our spiritual hearts have a monitor, which, whether we like it or not, reports directly to God. He always knows the health of our hearts in detail. He told Jeremiah, “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind.” The only way we could keep Houston from knowing certain details of Paul’s heart activity would be to turn off the monitor. That would be counter-productive to the goal of diagnosing and healing. However, we do not have that “off” switch to keep God from knowing the state of our spiritual heart. Unlike the physical heart monitor, fortunately, He has told us what details He is looking for, and we can control those details.

 Yes, control over our own hearts can be difficult. Paul the Apostle wrote a treatise agonizing over that difficulty. God expects a response from us, in the form of self-reporting. If the meditations of our heart are not acceptable to Him, He wants confession and repentance. All this because he wants to love us and care for us and He cannot do so if we turn away from Him.

So I ask myself, “What aspects of your thoughts and attitudes do you wish He could not ‘monitor?’ What do you want to do about that?”

 The first step is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart.” Blessedly, we don’t have to fix our malfunctioning hearts by ourselves; in fact, we cannot. He wants to cure us and He has the power to do so. But He requires our cooperation. He’s given us the instructions in the operating manual we call the Bible. We just need to follow it, as King David did, with our whole hearts.

 --Lynda Shenefield