Unexpected Blessings from Heart Surgery

"I don't want to have heart surgery", I remember saying to Andy a day or two before my surgery.  We had both learned, though, that if my mitral valve prolapse, which had already caused my heart to work harder and enlarge, were left untreated, then I'd be more likely to have heart failure in the future, and we didn't want that. So we agreed with my cardiologist that it seemed best to proceed with heart surgery to repair the valve for the sake of the long-term health of my heart.

I didn't anticipate blessings to come along with my heart surgery.  I suppose I saw it more as a trial to endure.  But God says of those who trust in Him, "I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.  I will rejoice in doing them good" (Jer. 32:40-41a)  And God has done good to me, both body and soul.

Physically, my surgery went great and so has recovery.  I was blessed by receiving great care by the nurses and hospital staff at Fairview Southdale.  I couldn't have asked for better care.  I've been recovering more quickly than expected, so I was released from the hospital a day early. Granted, I'm younger than most heart surgery patients, so I'm sure that plays a role. Also, I know many have been praying for me, and God has been answering their prayers!  I've been gaining strength each day.  Most of the time I no longer have pain!  And I'm hopeful that after recovery I'll have more energy than I did before the surgery.

My passion for the Lord has been renewed.  Remembering and writing down stories of what God has done in my life has reminded me of God's goodness in my life in so many ways!  And I still have so many more stories to write!  I'm thankful that others have been encouraged by my stories too!  Also, approaching major surgery helped me to remember what is most important.  It is having a relationship with God, who has so faithfully loved me and been good to me, despite my often being too busy to pursue closeness with Him.

Focusing on the most important things, like that I have a relationship with the God of the universe, who loves me and gave His Son to die for me, has given me joy despite the pain.  Just like after my bike accident in college (which I previously blogged about), God used pain to renew my joy in Him!  Ultimately, He is what matters so much more than anything else!

My relationship with Andy has grown closer through all this.  When considering the prospect that I may not make it out of heart surgery, the little squabbles don't matter so much.  But it means a lot that he's been there for me and has been serving me and our family in so many ways.

The thought that I may not survive heart surgery helped me to prioritize what is most important, rather than what seems most urgent.  Usually the schoolwork, housework, and weekly activities are what seem urgent, but in reality, they're not the most important.  Considering I might be in my last days helped me to prioritize what is important - things like writing down stories for my kids of what God has done in my life, writing notes of love and encouragement to each of my children, printing up each child's names, meanings, and related Bible verses to hang in their rooms, and giving extra hugs.  Now that I have survived the surgery, I want to remember to continue to prioritize what is most important, and not just what seems most urgent at the time.  

We have been blessed abundantly by so, so many friends and family praying for my surgery and recovery, encouraging me, caring for our children while I was in the hospital, visiting me in the hospital, providing us with a seemingly endless train of meals, giving me flowers, sending cards, and additional offers to help.  God has shown me His love and care through all the kindness and love shown to me through so many!  We feel so cared for and blessed!

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28).  That includes heart surgery, which God knew would be good for both my heart and soul.  God is good...very good.

I Will Be Here

After I graduated from UW-Madison,  I returned home to Milwaukee and began attending Eastbrook Church, where my brother Mark & sister-in-law Carol attended.  I began attending the college age group, because I loved the passion of college students.  The guy who did announcements offered free tickets to the church's play that weekend called Treasures in Heaven based on this passage, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal." (Matthew 5:19-20).  I asked a friend who had been at the church a while to introduce me to the guy who announced the free tickets, so I could get one, and she did.

He and I ended up talking for hours that Sunday afternoon in my parents' station wagon in the church parking lot.  His name was Andy.  As we talked and got to know one another, I noticed in him a desire to please God and a caring heart for the poor, two qualities that are very attractive to me.  I had a sense this was the man I was going to marry.

Over the next several months we continued to get to know one another better as we saw each other regularly at church and at the college-age fellowship group, often staying after to talk for a while.  My grandma died a short time after I met him, and I remember him asking me about her, listening attentively, and giving me a warm hug.  After I had a car accident and no longer had my own vehicle, he frequently gave me rides home from the Hope House homeless shelter where I worked regularly 'til 11pm.  That gave us lots more time to talk and get to know one another better.  It was clear that our growing feelings toward each other were mutual.    

We both were part of a short-term missions trip to Irkutsk, Russia that summer, along with other friends from our church and a nearby church.  That gave us an opportunity to see each other in other settings.  Andy gave regular talks, with his interpreter, about evidence for the Christian faith.  I spent much of my time leading Bible discussions with teenage girls, as well as striking up conversations with people I'd meet around the city.  We both returned to Irkutsk the following winter and spring as part of a smaller team to be with our beloved Russian friends who had become believers in Jesus and to encourage them in their new faith.  It was an incredible, unforgettable time in Russia that left its people deep on my heart.  I'm glad Andy & I got to share that experience.

A couple months after returning home, Andy asked me to marry him, and I said yes.  It was after that that I told him that I sensed on the day we met that he was the man I was going to marry.  We exchanged vows in front of family and friends four months later.  One of the verses on our wedding program was, "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart" (Psalm 37:4).  At our wedding, Andy sang a solo to me, "I Will Be Here" by Stephen Curtis Chapman.  It goes like this:

Tomorrow morning if you wake up
And the sun does not appear
I will be here
If in the dark we lose sight of love
Hold my hand and have no fear
'Cause I will be here

I will be here
When you feel like being quiet
When you need to speak your mind
I will listen
And I will be here
When the laughter turns to crying
Through the winning, losing and trying
We'll be together
'Cause I will be here

Tomorrow morning if you wake up
And the future is unclear
I will be here
As sure as seasons are made for change
Our lifetimes are made for years
So I will be here

I will be here
And you can cry on my shoulder
When the mirror tells us we're older
I will hold you
And I will be here
To watch you grow in beauty
And tell you all the things you are to me
I will be here

I will be true to the promise I have made
To you and to the One who gave you to me

And just as sure as seasons are made for change
Our lifetimes are made for years
So I will be here
We'll be together
I will be here

We've been married now for more than 23 years.  We've had good times and hard times.  We haven't always seen eye-to-eye on things, but God has kept us through it all.  And Andy has kept his promise to be here for me.  He was at the hospital praying for me during my heart surgery a few days ago and has been here during my recovery, even when I've been too sleepy to be good company.  It was nice to see the joy and warmth on his face when I awoke from heart surgery.  I had tubes coming out all over and couldn't talk, but I was happy to see him and have him by my side.  And I look forward to more years of being by each other's side.

Let Me Live That I May Praise You

When Andy & I met with my heart surgeon after Christmas to discuss my upcoming surgery, he commented, "You seem comfortable with going ahead with the surgery."  I don't imagine anyone is ever comfortable with having open heart surgery.  But I do trust that the Lord is in control, and He is my Shepherd and will not let anything happen to me apart from His will.  I chose the name of this blog from this passage:

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.  Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.  Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father's care.  And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.  So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."  Matthew 10:28-31

I'm very thankful that my surgeon told me that because I'm generally healthy and young (as far as heart surgery patients go), the risks are less than 1%.  Still, I know not all heart surgeries go as planned.  My dad died from an accident during heart surgery.  The heart surgery itself went well, but he died from a catheter puncturing his lungs and bleeding to death.  His death deeply saddened me.  I grieved for a long time.  But God was in control.  God had determined the number of days of my dad's life, as He has for each of us.  I know that whether I live or die, I am in God's loving care and in His will.

I look forward to being with the Lord in Heaven someday.  That will be Paradise.  As Psalm 16:11 says, "You make known to me the path of life: in Your presence there is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore."  My experience has been that there is no greater joy than being in God's presence.  How much better it will be face to face!

But when I think of my four young children whom I love dearly and want to be here for and continue to raise and hug and teach and mentor and play with and cheer on, my heart's cry is to live long enough to see them grow up.  I long to continue to share with them about the goodness and greatness of God, how He has been there for me, how His love is better than life, how He is the greatest treasure, how there is no greater joy than knowing Him and following Him, and to encourage them to love the Lord with all their hearts and to walk with Him all of their days.

These passages reflect my heart's cry:

"Let me live that I may praise you" Psalm 119:175

"In You, O Lord, I have taken refuge...
Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go...
For You have been my hope, Sovereign Lord, 
  my confidence since my youth...
As for me, I will always have hope; 
  I will praise you more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteous deeds,
  of your saving acts all day long -
  though I know not how to relate them all.
I will come and proclaim your mighty acts, Sovereign Lord;
  I will proclaim Your righteous deeds, Yours alone.
Since my youth, God, You have taught me,
  and to this day I declare Your marvelous deeds.
Even when I am old and gray,
  do not forsake me, my God,

till I declare Your power to the next generation,

  your mighty acts to all who are to come."  (portions of Psalm 71)

May it be so!

Russia

About a year after I graduated from college, Andy & I (who were not yet married) had the privilege of being part of a short-term missions team to Irkutsk, Siberia.  It was 1992, just one year after communism officially ended in Russia.  I had seen pictures on the news of people in Russia waiting in terribly long lines for bread.  For more than 70 years the people had been taught that there is no God and instead to trust in their government.  But their government had failed them.  Now Russians were looking elsewhere for hope.

I remember our first day in Russia, riding a bus through Moscow and being struck by the hopelessness I saw on people's faces.  I remember our second day in Irkutsk, one of my translators said to me, "I envy you, because of your faith, because you have hope."  We were each paired with a couple translators, and most of us became close friends with our translators that summer.  We spent lots of time with them and got to know each other well.  They heard over and over the good news that there is a God who loves us, our sin has separated us from God, but God sent Jesus to die for our sins, so that everyone who trusts in Him will be forgiven, become a child of God, and have eternal life with Him.  We grew to love our translators dearly.  I was deeply blessed by time with my translator Tanya and a couple 17-year-old girls who asked to meet with me daily to study the Bible together.  By the end of the summer most of our translators, along with my special 17-year-old friends, expressed that they had decided to trust in and follow Jesus, and they had hope!

One day that summer a visiting Christian professor came to Irkutsk to give a lecture.  We all went, along with many from the city.  I sat by an elderly woman named Vera (which means "faith") and struck up a conversation with her.  She was eager to hear what this professor had to say.  When I asked her if she had a Bible, she said, "Oh no, I could never afford a Bible!"  (Times were very hard economically.)  I gave her a Russian Bible, and she held her new treasure with such amazement and gratefulness!  She responded, "Now I KNOW God wants me to be his daughter!", and she held the Bible to her heart for the next 90 minutes during the lecture.  It's as if she instinctively recognized the surpassing worth of God's Word.  Psalm 19 tells it well: "The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart...They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb." (Psalm 19:8,10)

God put the people of Russia deep on my heart.  I loved being with them!  I made many special friends there who will always hold a very special place in my heart.

Lone Ranger to the Rescue

During the summer after my junior year of college I had the privilege of serving among the poor in Appalachia.  Their broken-down, leaking homes were small (about the size of one room of our house), but their hearts were large.  The families we served were quick to invite us to join them for a meal of green beans and cornbread, even if it meant we had to share plates and forks.  I loved being with them.  That summer I was on staff, which meant spending my days supporting and equipping volunteers to care for these families and help them with home repair.  I'd spend long days driving a truck full of building supplies on narrow roads on winding mountains to visit family after family as well as the volunteers helping them.  One day I drove up to the home of one of the families, and I didn't hit the brake soon enough.  I quickly found myself driving over a short cliff and getting stuck at the bottom.  I was okay, and the truck was okay, but I didn't know how I was going to get out of that deep pit.  Friends and neighbors peered over the cliff to see me.  Before I knew it, a stranger pulled up in his truck, attached a rope to the front of my truck, and towed me out of that pit.  Before I could thank him, he was gone (like the Lone Ranger)!    

Then there was the time we raced to help the Evans family during the middle of the night.  They were a dear family with a teenage boy and girl, whom we had enjoyed getting to know all summer as teams of volunteers worked on their home.  One night around 11pm, as it started to thunderstorm, our team leader Otis suddenly remembered their roof hadn't been covered.  We were in the middle of a roof repair project and hadn't expected it to rain that night.  But as the thunderstorm began, we all raced to the truck and drove the winding mountains out to their home and headed to their roof to put a tarp on and to cover the tarp with beams of wood.  I remember Otis kept shouting to me, "Get down!", afraid the wood beam would be a lightning rod for me.  When the roof was securely covered, the Evans welcomed us inside for hot chocolate, and we talked and laughed past midnight.

Those were crazy, wonderful days.  God protected us again and again and again.  Thank you, Lord!

Bike Accident

I was a social work major in college and did my senior internship at the Salvation Army homeless shelter.  One spring day as I was riding my bike to the shelter and turning through the intersection just before arriving, I found myself splat on the street in the middle of the busy intersection.  I don't know what caused the accident, but my left elbow and jaw were fractured.  Staff at the Salvation Army saw the accident, as well as onlookers.  An ambulance was called, and I was taken to a local hospital.  (I had plans to visit a good friend in the hospital that day, so I requested I be taken to that same hospital.  My friend was surprised when I called her from the hospital later that day and told her now I was in the hospital too!  Then instead of me going to visit her, she came to visit me!)

I remember being in the hospital and looking in the mirror with a mangled face and thinking I would look that way for the rest of my life.  God helped me respond by remembering that He is my greatest treasure,  I'll get to be with Him forever, and I am His beloved daughter, no matter the circumstances.  He gave me joy despite the pain.  I had surgery for both my fractured elbow and jaw.  My jaw had to be wired shut for six weeks, and I was only supposed to drink liquids.  (I did end up putting lots of foods in the blender.)  I was in the hospital for several days after the accident and on painkillers.  My social work supervisor came to visit me in the hospital.  I heard later that she told the class that I seemed in great spirits, and that she thought it was the drugs.  But I knew that my joy came from the Lord, who can give joy no matter the circumstances.

Immediately It Was Gone!

A short time after I committed my life to Christ, I remember being in a college Spanish class, and my teacher called me up to the front.  I had been having a sharp stomach cramp.  I asked God to take it away, and immediately it was gone!  I stood there in amazement that He answered my prayer so quickly!