“I suppose life would be a lot easier if you wouldn’t care about anything,” Dr. Halloran said to me the other day as we rushed through the cath lab doors.
“Life is easier if you don’t care about anything,” I agreed.
It wasn’t a time for discussion. We had both been expecting to leave the hospital a long time earlier, but here we were: in search of a cath film to determine the medical or surgical fate of someone’s heart.
Later, in the quiet, I thought about Dr. Halloran’s words. And I remembered the woman from Lebanon.
A few weeks ago, I drove to a hotel in South Bend to meet a Christian couple from Lebanon, to prepare for my upcoming trip to that country.
Lebanon is not known for stability. Although both the woman and her husband had grown up in Lebanon, she told me about a time in their lives when their friends told them to move to America. The woman leaned closer to me at the hotel lobby table, remembering vivid details of their mental battle.
“People told us we should move to the United States,” she said. “They reminded us that our brothers and sisters were here, that our daughters would be safer here.”
“But I said to my husband that night, I said it in Arabic, ‘Our hearts are in Lebanon!'”
So came their decision to not follow the concerned advice of relatives. So came the growth of a new relief organization, Heart for Lebanon. Today, they provide food, education, and the Word of God to hundreds of Muslim and Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria.
As much as we downplay emotions as tricky, untrustworthy things (perhaps Mennonites are especially bad at this) and uphold facts and figures, is not passion for a thing the only thing that can ever give us the commitment that knows no end?
Could it be that behind every successful venture of any kind, there is a person who cares? A person whose “heart is in…”? Could it be that for every soul victory, there is a person who cares? A person whose “heart is with…”?
Paul in the New Testament would have been much more peaceful if he hadn’t had a heart to tell people about Jesus. Corrie ten Boom and her family would have lived in comfort if they hadn’t had a heart for persecuted Jews. Jesus himself would have been much more at leisure staying in heaven where things were nice, if he hadn’t had a heart for…me.
Giving your heart is a tricky business. If you wish for calm, don’t care about anyone. Love for people seems inevitably to involve heartache, confusion, questions, sleepless nights, arguments.
Yet sometimes it’s hard to tell…do I love this cause or this person too much? Where is the balance? How do we know if we are caring too much, or caring at the expense of something or someone else?
Amy Carmichael, rescuer of children, comments on the death of one of the girls under her care.
“She was the sort of child who nestles into the heart and we could not help her slipping into that innermost place, which perhaps should never be given to any little child. And yet He said ‘Love…as I have loved you.’ We cannot love too much.” (A Chance to Die, by Elisabeth Elliot)
I think she has the key here:
“And yet He said…”
If our love for Christ is always greatest, and we base every action on “what He said”, our love for others will never be wasted, no matter how dismal the scenery, no matter how impossible the love, no matter how unnoticed the compassion.
Paul, Jesus, Corrie ten Boom, Amy Carmichael…none of them had children. Perhaps that is an important distinction that freed them to abandon themselves to their work. Still, I think the principle holds true for anyone, whether single, married, or parents: If we can first catch a glimpse of the love that Jesus had for us, we can spend the rest of our lives in imitation, pouring ourselves into the people around us, without regret, no matter the cost.