The Heart Stretches

The Heart Stretches

The human heart is a wonder. I don’t mean its chambers and its arteries or the intricate rhythms and flows that sustain life, although those are mysterious and majestic enough. I mean the heart’s amazing capacity to stretch and hold what it must, to take in more than might seem possible, then expand to receive still more.

I knew this as I sat by the bedside of my oldest aunt, an eighty-four-year-old woman who never lived more than a few miles from where she was born, picked cotton and ginned it, married twice but had no children, cared for her own aging parents until their deaths, and loved my sister and me like we were her own. On her nightstand sat the only personal artifact in a small and sterile room: a photograph of her husband, my uncle, who had passed away the year before.

Her world had been small. Her heart was not. My sister and I drove nearly fifteen hours to spend less than five hours with her. But every mile was worth the trip. She hardly spoke and seldom smiled. Her hair was snowy white, and her body was little more than bones. But her face said she knew us and remembered. I couldn’t stop smiling at her. She had always made my heart glad.

“What are you thinking?” I asked her as she slowly ate her breakfast, even though she’d barely said a word the day before. I waited. She waited. Then she said, looking me full in the face, “Just how good it is to be with you.” My heart broke a little at that, and at the sound of her voice. And in the breaking, more room was made.

The heart stretches—just when you think it might break. Ask the mother of an adolescent son with cerebral palsy, enduring weeks of surgery and rehab when other kids his age are off at summer camp. Ask the man who holds his dying brother’s hand, and whose comforting presence is the only medicine left to give. The heart stretches. Pain clears the way for still more love.

Hearts that are held by Jesus do not break. They stretch. And when they do, they hold more love, not less.

I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.

Ezekiel 11:19, NASB