As a friend undergoes quadruple bypass surgery, my own heart bleeds for his wife and young son. The heart is such a delicate thing. We only have one. Unlike our kidneys or lungs, Mother Nature only gave us one, and if it doesn’t pump correctly, we are so out of luck. It is the pump that drives our life’s blood, that keeps us alive by delivering oxygen to our cells and carrying away the waste produced by those same cells. When the heart’s blood supply is cut off, we die, and the complex network of arterial arteries and veins can become clogged and cause trouble. My friend is having his plumbing reworked tonight in an attempt to save his life. The heart keeps us alive, though, in more ways than we know. The heart is also a metaphor for love, beating a little faster when the beloved is near, feeling empty and heavy when the beloved is absent. One suffers heartbreak, loneliness and sorrow because of the heart, a fist sized organ tucked in between the lungs just under the breastbone. It sustains us when we are said, celebrates our victories with joy. We can feel it when it beats, sending blood pulsing through our veins and arteries. Both literal and metaphor, the heart measures our well-being, or our sadness, or our happiness, our bliss, our ecstasy. When the heart goes wrong, our outlook can only turn black. The heart sustains us even in the dark night of the soul because the heart believes in hope, and maybe that is the only thing we have left in our darkest hour. Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things, but without it, I’m not really sure what is left. Certainly, the heart faces failure, defeat, and disillusion because those are also a part of all lives, but I also think the heart is resilient and can snap back from those blackest of thoughts when one feels alone and abandoned against the entire world. Healing comes through the heart. So tonight, one man and his family will face the toughest challenge a man can ever face: his own mortality. Yet it will be his heart that which sees him through to the other side. The heart, the veins, the medulla, burn gloriously and brightly, but there are severe truths that even the heart cannot deny. If he heals, it will be his own heart which brings him healing. The hands of the surgeon, created and guided by God, will put him back on his feet. The heart knows about mortality, knows that it will eventually return to the ashes out of which it rose, knows that nothing will go on forever. Yet, for now, the soul swims in that cold river of mortality because the heart knows how.