Test of Faith
I just got back from the cardiologist’s office.
On Sunday, my heart started doing funny things — it’s not pain, but it’s definitely pressure, or abrupt movements interrupting the usual slow and steady pattern. These sensations just aren’t natural. It’s weird; our bodies are built so that when the heart is functioning well, we’re not supposed to notice that it’s there. It just does its job, and if we don’t notice it – that means everything is okay. It’s one of our most important organs, but it’s designed to go unappreciated.
The cardiologist ran an EKG and did not like what he saw; he said that someone my age should not have an EKG reading that looked like that. He also drew seven (SEVEN!!!) tubes of blood for further testing, and suggested that I check into a hospital tonight so he could run an echo and other tests. In the end, we decided that another office visit tomorrow would be better, so that’s what I’m doing, and hopefully we’ll know more twenty-four hours from now.
In the meantime, I feel oddly fragile. I feel like God is reminding me that all life belongs to Him, nothing is for certain except that which He commands, and we don’t set the courses for our own lives. Young people tend to feel like they’re going to live forever, that their health and vigor will last well into the horizon that is oh-so-far-away… I feel like that wind has been momentarily been taken out of my sails, because apparently, some cardiologist thinks that my heart’s condition deserves great concern at this moment in time.
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Part of me — I think most of me — is fearful right now, but knows deep down at some point beyond the layer of fear, that things will be okay. God has plans for my life, and He wouldn’t have brought me this far, only to let me tumble… would He?
… Or would He? This is a good opportunity for me to test my beliefs in a sovereign God. Like many other people, I have trouble reconciling the suffering in this world — but mostly my ending point of analysis becomes simply that God is God and I am not, and His ways are bigger than mine, and He in all His infinite wisdom, love, and might has a much better and holier picture of the world than I do. So who am I to question Him, when all I am able to see with my human mind and eyes in this vast universe is my little smidgen of a corner?
Applying that view to my situation, it’s harder to swallow. I guess things like that are more difficult to accept when they become personal … but that is the test of true belief. And I think… I think I can still say, that even if God never let His plans for me materialize for whatever reason — I wouldn’t like it, but I would still believe that He had some greater purpose, and I think I would still try to trust that when I got to heaven, I would look back and it would utterly defy logic, but up there, from that view, it would make total sense.