Happy Heart day!!!

Today is Heart Day!!! I think it is utterly fascinating how many different sayings, phrases, songs, books, poems, emjois, etc. we have for issues of the heart. The heart is a fascinating, mind-bending thing. It’s an organ but it’s also so much more. For me my whole life has been a matter of the heart. I literally wear my heart on my sleeve (if you’ve seen my tattoo), but that’s not the whole story.

If you’re like me you love a good story, one that takes you into experiences you couldn’t possibly imagine, down paths with twists and turns you never could predict, and filled with an inspiring, consuming love that you can only dream one day to be able to grasp at. Some authors can write a story that is so semantically beautiful that at times you feel as though you can smell and taste the very scenery they describe. The world of books is one that I love to escape and get lost in. One I feel many of us love to wish and long for, but I feel we sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

            You see while I read fascinating plots with crazy twists and epic love stories I realize I’m missing the epic tale that God is writing in my own mundane life. Yes, I don’t like when the alarm clock rings and I have to roll out of my delightfully warm bed to travel the few steps to my desk to start my workday. Yes, I loathe trudging down the three flights of stairs in the freezing (albeit most the time above freezing) weather to let my 4 year old black lab do his business. I realize as I scroll through facebook and see all my “friends” traveling to far off places, getting married, making babies; that I covet their milestones and life stories. And don’t even get me started on the chores of life that make me grumble and groan while I sweep up the equivalent of a small puppy from the fur that billows off my dog, or while I stuff as much laundry into one load and then leave it in the dryer for days because the thought of folding and hanging a months worth of clothes just seems too immense to bare.

            But that’s life! Right? The everyday mundane things that make us grumble is life. But it’s what we all try to escape from when we watch movies, read books or play video games (to list a few). And I can’t help but laugh at myself for how much I seem to view life as chores instead of blessings, as mundane instead of extraordinary. Instead of extra…ordinary! You see, I… like you, have this amazingly epic love story unfolding before my eyes every moment of everyday, but I miss it!

This is my story of the heart, my love story…. What’s yours?

My parents prayed, and tried for years to have their second child. You see they loved the amazing little blonde haired blue-eyed, vivacious girl that God had blessed them with, and they longed to give her a sibling to play with. They wanted to plan to have their kids two years apart so they could play and be fast friends. But as God always seems to do, he has a different plan. So at almost four years since their first, God answered my parent’s prayers with their second daughter. Their precious baby was blessed with a crazy head of long dark hair and a not so perfect heart. They watched helplessly as their little baby went through heart failure, was life flighted away, was baptized in the hospital for fear that she wouldn’t survive long in our world, and then discovered that she was born with two heart defects: a narrowing in the aorta and a bicuspid aortic valve. They spent the first months of her life feeding her medicine that she would throw up and wondering what God’s purpose and plan for all this was. At ten months old they found out the medicine was no longer helping their little girl and that she would need to go under the knife. After a long day on March 3, 1987 their little girl came out of surgery mended and full of energy. She no longer had a pulse in her left arm as they used it to fix the narrowing in her aorta but they were told she would live a very long and normal life.

My Family (left to right) Me, Janna, Bruce, Joe, Jenn

            This was my story, the story I was told a lot growing up. I was told it everytime we went back to the hospital for my check ups, everytime I complained because I wasn’t allowed to do the same things my classmates were doing for fear that it would put too much stress on my heart, everytime I went to the dentist and had to chew 9 huge chalky nasty antiobotics to prevent bacteria from getting into my body for fear my heart couldn’t fight an infection. Over and over I heard my story. And I hated it! I hated that I was different, that in third grade I was no longer allowed to do anything that strained my upper body, so doing the ropes in gym class was out.

I hated my story, but it was mine and I learned over the years to embrace it. I knew that my life was a miracle but I didn’t see just how beautifully God is at writing each of our stories.

            God, had a plan and still does! At 25 I realized God was calling me into full time ministry so I decided to quit my job in corporate America and move to Texas to go back to school. I went to visit my grandparents before I moved out of Iowa and soon learned just how amazingly detailed my love story is. You see I knew my parents prayed, I knew that God answered their prayers for my life, to keep me safe and healthy; and to help me survive that first precarious year. But I didn’t know just how covered in prayer I was during that time. My paternal grandmother gave me a poem she had written that first year of my life titled “Kathryn Marie I prayed for you”. In a nutshell it is one of the most wonderful gifts I could ever have received from her and something I have and will treasure all my life. Over and over the poem repeats “Kathryn Marie I prayed for you!” After receiving this wonderful gift I left to go visit my maternal grandparents and go to church with them. At the end of the church service my Grandmother got up and asked for the congregation to pray for me, she told them about my plans for going into ministry, and then reminded them that they had prayed for me before. On March 3, 1987 they had held a 24-hour prayer vigil while I was undergoing surgery.

My Grandma Amendt and I --the day she gave me the poem

My Grandpa Amendt and I

My Grandpa and Grandma Hight--the same day as the above pics (and the day she asked her church to pray for me)

            My imperfectly formed heart was overflowing that day with awe, love, thanksgiving, and so many more emotions then I can put into words. My mundane life was (is) a series of answered prayers by some pretty amazing prayer warriors. God had and has a plan. God had truly blessed my life, my family, my surgeon’s hands, and my heart more then I ever imagined. His story for me was more riddled with details then I knew.

            That vivacious little blonde blue-eyed girl I mentioned earlier…. My amazingly wonderful big sister Jennifer was and is always a part of his details. My parents wanted to plan for us to best friends, but we were anything but that growing up. For the longest time we would push each others buttons, get each other in trouble, and I would be to her that annoying little tag along. 

My bestfriend and Sister Jenn and I hamming it up!

          But we were sisters and friendship (while always there) grew and grew into best friends. Jenn had moved to Texas before me and helped me find God’s path into ministry. But even more intricately then that God placed Jenn where she was so that she would become friends with an amazing woman Teri. 

Jenn & Teri in Austin

         Teri had a daughter at the university I was going to attend. Her daughters name is Ellen and she was a sophomore at Concorida when I moved to Austin. Ellen and I became roommates by default, but God’s hand was in the friendship between Teri and Jenn and in the making of roommates and friends between Ellen and myself. 

Ellen and I

         We all learned that our families had a LOT in common. Besides Ellen’s older brother going to Iowa State University (my alma mater… Go Cyclones!) and beside both our families being Lutheran… their family and mine also share an important anniversary. March 3^rd! Known in my family as my heart surgery day, a day that gave me a new life. One where I could be the bubbly crazy girl God made me to be. March 3^rd to the Rice family… is known as Van’s new heart day! The day Van received the amazing gift of life through organ donation!

            I’m not sure how God did it… and what crazy little intricate details God had to put into place to bring our two families together but he did and I am in awe. What are the odds that we share something as crazy and unique as March 3^rd Heart Day! God is truly amazing you see not only did He save my life in 1987 but He saved Van’s life in 1994 on the same day. And then years later had our paths cross.

The amazing Rice family (left to right) Teri, Trevor, Kiba (puppy), Ellen, Van

            Blessings and events like this just make me stop and wonder at what details in our lives we miss each day because we are focusing on the wrong thing. Because we are focusing on the tree and we miss the forest. God blesses us each day with so many things, more then we could ever imagine, yet we take those blessings and turn them into chores, we take those mundane things and forget how sacred, how perfectly wonderful they are! We forget that we don’t need to escape into stories, or movies to find love. Because our story… yes yours too, is so overwhelmingly filled with love that even the best novelists or movie directors can never depict our story.

            We are so loved by God that he would send his son, to die so that we wouldn’t just be given life here and now. But that we would be given eternal life, life forever with him! He not only saved my life, and Van’s and fixed what was broken in with our physical hearts but he fixed what was broken in us! He mends us, He washes us clean, He loves us more then we can ever envision, so that we can have new life in Him! So that your heart issues, your matters of the heart can be mended and made new! So that we can love on others, we can love on our families, or friends, or pets, that annoying driver in front of you during rush hour, the mean person who always seems out to get you…everyone!

 Today March 3^rd will forever in the Amendt and Rice family be our Heart Day! But today I want to invite you all to make it your heart day too! To walk through your story to realize that every moment is a blessing, whether it was a time of immense pain, or ecstatic joy, and to realize that your detailed, messy, wonderful story is a matter of the heart… because your heart matters and because it has been mended and fixed too! God bless you and your wonderful mundane world today and everyday!!! And may you find the joy, love, and wonderful story not in a book, tv show, movie, etc. but in your story! Because you are loved to death…by an amazing God who loves you far beyond death! Happy Heart day!!