A recent health surprise (I had to have open-heart surgery to bypass two clogged arteries) exposed my tendency to think, like the Pharisee praying in Luke 18, God, thank you that I am not like other men, overweight with high blood pressure. I eat heart-healthy, skip desserts, and walk on my treadmill.
I should have been praying for God's mercy—which He was kind enough to provide, in part through the talents of Austin cardiologists Paul Tucker and Stephen Dewan.
Which leads to a physical recommendation and then some more important spiritual ones. The physical: If you're 40 or above and have a parent who had heart disease, don't assume your own immunity just because you're in good shape.
The classic case is that of Jim Fixx, who popularized jogging and wrote The Complete Book of Running, a best-seller in 1977. He ran daily but died seven years later, at the age of 52, from a massive heart attack. An autopsy revealed substantial arterial blockages. His father had suffered a heart attack at the age of 35 and died of one at 42.
The spiritual recommendations stand on the shoulders of Minneapolis pastor and author John Piper. He wrote on the eve of his prostate surgery, "Don't waste your cancer. You will waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death." Amen. A whiff of fatality is a great gift, because it gets us thinking about death while we still have the opportunity in this life to do more than to mourn our sins and wasted time.
(An old novel by Joseph Wambaugh features a policeman who is getting his life together but is fatally shot. His last words are something like "I was just starting to know," but those coming to help him, too late, merely believe him to be saying, "No, no, no.")
One Piper thought hit me straight on, since to comfort others—and myself—I had told people my bypass operation had only a 2 percent fatality rate. Piper criticizes "the rationalistic, human calculation of odds" and notes that we are to rely on God who raises the dead: "The aim of God in your cancer (among a thousand other good things) is to knock props out from under our hearts so that we rely utterly on Him."
Continued... |