It has happened.

I was at a long dinner table the other night, cutting my iceberg wedge salad and sprinkling it with bacon and bleu cheese when I was reminded that God made man in His own image.

It was a meeting about the TAVR procedure, the new way to fix someone’s heart valve without putting them through open surgery.  With typical surgery, the breastbone is cut and the heart is opened. The surgeon removes the bad valve and sews the new one in place.

With the new procedure, an expandable valve that looks like it’s made of chicken wire (only it’s the $30,000 version) is inserted through the blood vessels and carefully positioned inside the old valve. When it is in exactly the right position, it is expanded and planted against the diseased valve.

This actually works. However, right now in the United States, because it is a new procedure, it is only performed on people who are too sick for regular surgery.

Dr. Halloran was explaining that when the valve is placed and expanded, the heart must be paced into an abnormal rhythm to rein in the normal beating action.

He was standing at the end of the dining room showing us the X-rays from an actual TAVR procedure on a huge screen. The pictures were black and gray and white like X-rays always are, the different shades representing different tissues. We could see the heart quivering in an odd rhythm while the chicken wire valve expanded and locked in place.

“If the heart beats during the expansion it will eject the new valve and that thing will go flying to who knows where,” Dr. Halloran explained.

“It’s never happened for us, but…” He glanced at the representative from the valve company who was familiar with thousands of these procedures.

“It has happened,” the rep said, in an ominous tone.

I paused mid-chew and my eyes must have taken on a distant expression. (Have you ever had these moments, when it seems that the curtain of eternity lifts for a split second?)

God didn’t just make us, as He made fruit trees and planets. He made us like Him. What a thing to be made in the image of God with a heart like that, a heart powerful enough to blow apart the plans of a team of smart people with one beat!

The TAVR procedure is the accomplishment of doctors, surgeons, inventors, investors, engineers, scientists, and businessmen. They are the leading edge of a technology that replaces valves without big surgery.

But all these brains, all that science, and all those dollars have been outwitted at times by one powerful stroke of the heart, sending the finely-crafted valve spinning out into the blood vessels of the body, going places that metal should never go.  The heart that “outwits them” is not that of a young tennis player. No. These are frail 80-year-old hearts, in people too sick for regular surgery.

And I think, if at 80 years old the human heart is still a thing of wonder, after decades of wear, what about the eternal human soul? Why do we work out to protect our body and heart, yet forget to work out spiritually? And how could we ever be careless in our dealings with other people’s deepest hurts or hopes, the deepest places of the heart?

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” –C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Even if they are diseased and sick, the soul of each person has a power and potential that could only come from being made in the image of its Maker.  May all who follow Christ embrace the ministry of reconciliation, praying that our hearts and the hearts of our neighbors be restored to full relationship with the One who made them.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in You.” –St. Augustine, Confessions