The Night My Heart Was Torn Open
One of the great illusions of life is that tomorrow feels guaranteed. We know better, of course. We attend funerals. We read obituaries. We hear stories of accidents, illnesses, and tragedies that arrive without warning. We know intellectually that life is fragile. Yet most mornings we quietly assume that our plans will unfold more or less as expected. I certainly did.
The morning began like countless others before it. Sharon and I started the day together. I settled into my work. Emails arrived. Projects moved forward. Conversations were held. Decisions were made. It was a good day, an ordinary day, and I had every reason to believe it would end like thousands of days that had come before it. It didn’t.
By late afternoon, a strange pain had begun moving across my chest. Within a few hours, I would be in an ambulance. A few hours after that, I would be unconscious in a cath lab. Before the night was over, a surgeon would be fighting to save my life after a catastrophic complication tore a hole in my heart. But I didn’t know any of that when I woke up that morning. And that’s the point. None of us do.
James wrote, “You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life?
For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” For most of my life, I read those words primarily as theology. That night, they became reality.
For years, I had worked in environments that valued planning, forecasting, preparation, and execution. I believe in all of those things. Throughout my career, I helped lead large organizations, technology initiatives, and teams responsible for significant responsibilities. Good leaders plan. Good organizations plan. Good families plan. Planning matters. But one of the lessons life eventually teaches us is that planning and control are not the same thing. We plan. God governs. Those two truths are not enemies. But confusing them can lead us into trouble.
I often think about how quickly my world changed that day. In the span of just a few hours, everything I assumed about the next week, the next month, and perhaps even the next decade suddenly disappeared. Publishing projects no longer mattered. Meetings no longer mattered. Schedules no longer mattered.
What mattered was breath. A heartbeat. Another hour. Another day.
And while I was unconscious, what mattered most to those who loved me was not my career, my accomplishments, my degrees, my titles, or any of the things our culture often treats as measures of success. What mattered was relationship. My wife wanted her husband. My children wanted their father.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that we often spend too much time investing in things that will never love us back and that won’t endure into eternity. Careers matter. Achievement matters. Stewardship matters. But relationships and our love for God and one another matter more. They transcend this life and enter eternity.
I have often pondered what was happening in Sharon’s heart during those long hours while she waited for news. I was unconscious. I knew nothing about the decisions required of her. I knew nothing of the uncertainty, the fear, or the prayers being lifted on my behalf. She knew. My children knew. The people who loved me knew. When I awoke and later as I learned these things firsthand… I wept. I still do. Overwhelmed by what my wife and family faced and sacrificed for me throughout those dark days.
One of the strange realities of severe illness is that the patient is often unaware of much of the suffering occurring around him. The family carries burdens the patient never sees. As I reflected on those events later, I found myself increasingly grateful not only for the physicians and nurses who cared for me, but also for the people who waited, prayed, worried, and hoped.
The medical team was fighting for my life. My family was fighting for our future together. Both mattered. And God was right there in our midst, orchestrating every event and providing divine grace that was sufficient to see us through. God did not abandon us. He was in our suffering with us.
I have spent much of my life fascinated by science and technology. Long before I became a patient, I admired the ingenuity, discipline, and perseverance required to advance human knowledge. But admiration became gratitude when I found myself dependent upon those advances and the medical personnel who had studied a lifetime to know how to use them to save my life.
I am alive today because gifted physicians spent years mastering their craft. I am alive because researchers pursued difficult questions. I am alive because engineers designed technologies capable of supporting a failing body. I am alive because nurses remained vigilant through long hours. I am alive because countless people devoted their lives to solving problems they knew they might never personally face. And I am alive because God created it all… and orchestrated the time of so many events that it takes my breath away if I ponder it for long.
God deserves our appreciation. Our gratefulness. Our worship. Our very lives. He owes us nothing, but he has given us everything. Even the breath you just exhaled as you read this sentence.
Sometimes Christians mistakenly speak as though acknowledging God’s sovereignty somehow requires minimizing human effort. I don’t see it that way. The God who created the human mind is glorified when that mind is used wisely. The God who established the laws governing the universe is not threatened when people discover them. The God who created the human heart is not dishonored when surgeons learn how to repair one.
In my own story, gratitude toward God and gratitude toward medicine are not competing emotions. They are companions. The more I learned about what happened that night and the following weeks and months, the more grateful I became to both.
Yet something else happened as well. The experience exposed the illusion of self-sufficiency. Before that day, I already understood intellectually that I depended on others. No one succeeds alone. No one builds a career alone. No one builds a family alone. No one builds a business alone. But understanding something intellectually and experiencing it personally are two very different things. Just like knowing about Jesus is very different than knowing Jesus.
That night stripped away every illusion of independence. I could not save myself. I could not reason my way out of the crisis. I could not work harder. I could not lead better. I could not solve the problem. I was entirely dependent upon God and the people He had placed around me.
Looking back, I see that dependence not as a weakness but as a gift. A painful gift, certainly. One I would never have chosen. But a gift nonetheless. Because dependence reminds us of something pride often causes us to forget.
We were never meant to carry life alone.
From the very beginning, God designed us for relationship—with Him and with one another. God himself, his very essence, is community: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The trinity. One God, revealed in three persons. And we are made in his likeness. We are made for community.
The illusion of autonomy is powerful, especially in cultures that celebrate individual achievement. But eventually life exposes the limits of self-reliance. Sometimes it happens through loss. Sometimes through failure. Sometimes through aging. And sometimes through a Tuesday afternoon that unexpectedly turns into a fight for survival.
One of the most enduring lessons from that night is not that life is fragile. I already knew that. It is that every ordinary day is a gift. Every conversation. Every meal. Every prayer. Every hug. Every opportunity to tell someone you love them. Every opportunity to serve. Every opportunity to forgive. Every opportunity to encourage. Every opportunity to point someone toward Christ so that their sins can be forgiven and not counted against them forever.
We assume there will always be another chance.
Sometimes there is. Sometimes there isn’t.
That realization has changed the way I try to live. Not perfectly. But intentionally. I still make plans. I still set goals. I still work hard. I still dream about the future. But I hold those plans more loosely than I once did. Because I know now, in a way I did not know before, that tomorrow is not promised. It is a gift. A gift from the God who holds every tomorrow in His hands.
The night my heart was torn open taught me many lessons. But perhaps the first was this: ordinary days are far more precious than we realize. Scripture teaches us this truth in Psalm 90:12, “[Lord]Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
And sometimes we don’t fully understand their value until one of them suddenly changes everything. Scripture teaches us this truth in Psalm 90:12,
“[Lord] Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
In the next post, I want to explore another lesson that emerged from those events. It concerns what happens when medicine, science, and human knowledge reach the edge of what they can explain—and why that edge has fascinated me for much of my life.