One of my favorite things to do is  to see God dramatically change a person, transplanting his heart of compassion for their own self-focused heart.  Ian Schumann is going through a heart transplant operation and is awake, watching himself. It makes for a fascinating blog.  Here he is blogging from a remote location in Kenya.

 

This week is cool. Uncomfortable, hot, draining, stretching. Somehow familiar. Somehow like coming home. Everyday something is changing. Hearts are shifting, if only a little.

 

"The fact that I can look starving orphans in the eyes and continue on with my day," I said to my team yesterday, "strongly suggests I have some serious defense mechanisms in place." But yesterday I was tired. My armor was cracked, eroded. A little girl in a filthy green dress walked past me, barefoot and naive in the sand.  The upbeat music seemed so heartbreakingly unsympathetic, so dissonant with what was before my eyes. A welling-up came. The crowd disappeared, the music muffled--only this girl remained, and my sad cruel jagged heart started to break.

And then the moment passed. I teetered at the edge, and wavered, hesitant.

Had I been a little more weary, my defenses run a little more threadbare, I know what could have happened. The wrecking ball. On some level, I want this--and it is coming. But I'm afraid of it. What happens after the breakdown? For X number of hours, days (weeks?), I am utterly incapacitated. Useless. Incoherent. I'm Ron Burgundy inside a glass case of emotion. I have nothing insightful or conclusive to say, nothing enlightened or
authoritative to do. If this happens, for a time I will just hurt for this hurting world, and I'll be incapacitated.

Funny, coming from a guy who so much values his own personal capacity.
***

I was talking to Jake about all this "breakdown" stuff last night, and it's interesting now in retrospect. During the course of the week we both started to realize that the kind of punctuated wrecking moment we've heard about or imagined may not ever come, or need to.

We both had experiences this week that pushed us to our personal "edge," then both of us seemed to back off from that
precipice, and yet both of us were grown and changed in the process anyway. Almost as if to say: the fact that we approached the "edge" at all, the fact that we even noticed the strain--that's already evidence of the change that's taking place.

 

 

Although it may come at some point, there's no need for a crazy breakdown episode in order for God to be changing our hearts in big ways.