A hole in my heart.

I have a hole in my heart, dug out by a thoughtless person who didn't even realize she was being thoughtless.   And yet, it simply uncovered a long term defect from a decades old injury that has plagued me often and crippled me at times.  

If it were a physical thing, they would assess it and see how life threatening it is and perhaps they would operate and close it up so that my physical heart would heal and function normally.  But for this emotional/spiritual wound, there is no procedure; yet it will need to be repaired and given space to heal.  I have begun the preliminary consultations with the great physician.

When I was a girl, I had a friend who had a hole in his heart.  He was weaker, less vital, paler than the other kids.  He tired easily.  But in all other ways, he was just one of the kids in our church.  In that day of waiting for medicine to develop and mature, -the early 60s- they were waiting for him to reach some stage or plateau before performing the operation which at that time was of itself life-threatening.  One day after an effort to keep up with the kids around him anyway, he died.  His heart could not take the strain.

Medical understanding has developed.  Procedures have been refined.  Open heart surgery is still open heart surgery, but I don't doubt that if he was a child today, his life would be spared.  Yet emotional and spiritual strength and injury have not advanced so far.

The recent injury was simply an irritation of the old wound.  And it must be opened and carefully repaired and then allowed to heal for the processes of living to be reasonable.  It's odd, but I had learned to live with the disability that the first wound caused.  I avoided certain things, I stuffed the anger and hurt away into boxes, gritted my teeth and then forced a smile to replace the grimace.

I had forgotten the hole in my heart.  But my heart had not.  Often my mind could not reconcile the anger and hurt that lay inside when some scene or action taken by another pricked at it.  I felt guilt for not handling life as though my heart were healthy.  There is a stigma attached to not being ‘normal’.  It is the stigma that killed my friend half a century ago.

Innocence bears a certain, yet sometimes faulty, protection.  Knowledge requires action.  Perhaps the recent injury, unkind as it was, was the mercy messenger to begin the process of healing.  And so it has begun.  I wish I could say it is done for we all want desperately to be whole, full functioning individuals.  But I am in the process and that is a better place than I was in before in spite of my loss of innocence, my fear and my pain.  I believe I shall be conformed to the image of God’s son.  It’s not an easy process at all, but it must be done and now is the time.

I hope to write one day and tell you it is finished and all the scars are healed.  I hope to run my own race with vigor.