I was watchin T.V. the other night and while channel surfing came across a program that got me thinking. I cant remember what the program was, but it got me thinking about the different things you read on peoples headstones' epitaphs at the cemetery.
For example Spike Milligan's headstone is rumoured to read: "I told them I was ill". Others that I found after a short search with Google include: Karl Marx (founder of communism); "Workers of all lands unite. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." - Wyatt and Josephine Earp (Sherrif of Tombstone- cowboy era); "Nothing's so sacred as honour, and nothing's so loyal as love." Dean Martin (Actor Singer and member of the Rat Pack); "Everybody loves somebody sometime." Isaac Newton; "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light." Benjamin Frankin; "The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents worn out, and stript of its lettering and gilding) lies here, food for worms. Yet the work itself shall not lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more In a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by its Author." Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier by W. H. Auden; "To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"
As you can see, some are amusing, some are clever and some are truly profound. Each epitaph says much about the person who lies beneath the stone and dirt. I particularly like the epitaph for the unknown soldier.
What sort of impact will you leave?
What will people say about you when you are gone?
What would you like your epitaph to say on your headstone?
Monday, September 29, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
A Hardened Heart
This is a copy of a sermon I shared a few weeks ago. It is a little long for a blog, but I thought it might be a good reminder to us to be a little more compassionate at times, I know I need reminding of that at times.
Before moving to Melbourne to go to the Training College, I worked as an Operating Theatre Technician at the Hobart Private Hospital. My job there was to set up operating theatres for different operations, assist the doctors and nurses to position patients for various operations, ensure that there was an adequate supply of things like Saline and other fluids given by I.V. drips kept warm, help get the patient off the operating table, clean up the mess and get the theatre set up for the next operation.
During this time I had the privilege to observe a number of operations at various degrees of proximity. The closest I got was about 30cm (1 foot) from the operative site as I held a patient in place while they inserted a pacemaker into their heart.
A heart has 4 chambers, the left and right ventricle, and the left and right atrium. The right atrium receives oxygen-depleted blood from the body via the superior vena cava and the inferior vena cava and pumps it through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle.
The right ventricle receives oxygen-depleted blood from the right atrium and pumps it through the pulmonary valve into the lungs via the pulmonary artery.
Then the left atrium receives oxygen-rich blood from the lungs via the pulmonary veins and pumps it through the mitral valve into the left ventricle.
The left ventricle then receives oxygen-rich blood from the left atrium and pumps it through the aortic valve to the entire body via the aorta, including to the heart muscle itself through the coronary arteries.
That’s the way our heart works and why our heart beat is a lub lub sound.
What happens in some people though, is that one of the chambers fibrillates or flutters. When this happens the blood is not pumped around the body properly and the patient starts to get into some pretty serious trouble. To restore a normal or sinus rhythm to the heart something is needed to be done. The first preference is to use drugs like adrenalin to jolt the heart back into a normal rhythm, but in serious cases an electric current is needed to jolt the heart back into normal rhythm. That is why you see defibrillators used on people having a heart attack. A pace maker is like a mini defibrillator, it senses when the heart is getting out of rhythm, and it sends a little jolt into the heart to fix it, most of the time the patient will never know it happened.
As I read the bible I see how God often shocks people to get them to change their heart. In Exodus we see that the Pharaoh needed some serious shocking to change a very hard heart.
Pharaoh was holding the Hebrew people prisoner, and using them as slaves to complete his building projects. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and their terrible treatment they cried out to God to save them.
So God sends Moses, who lets be honest wouldn’t exactly be most people’s top choice (he had a speech impediment, he had killed an Egyptian slave master and was a shepherd, a less than prestigious occupation) to shock the pharaoh into a change of heart and bring freedom to the Hebrew people.
As a result of the pharaoh’s hardened heart and unwillingness to release the Hebrew people, God uses a series of plagues that cover Egypt to try and change the pharaoh’s heart.
Today we are looking at the plague of the Frogs. Now if ever there was a good reason to change your heart, a pile of stinking, rotting frogs has to be high on the list.
On of the most interesting things about the whole plagues of Egypt saga has to be the pharaoh’s response. Each time, after a plague was stopped the Bible tells us that the Pharaoh hardened his heart. Despite the shock of the plague, the pharaoh’s heart remained unchanged.
Three things struck my about the hardening of the pharaoh’s heart. The first was that he made a choice to harden his heart. The Second was that when the pharaoh hardened his heart, he ignored the warning signs around him. And finally the pharaohs heart need to be softened again before he would let the Hebrew people go.
I think it is interesting that the pharaoh chose to harden his heart. He had the choice to allow it to remain soft and release the Hebrew people, but instead after each plague the pharaoh hardened his heart a little more.
While sometimes circumstances around us force us to harden our hearts, I think more often the choices we make slowly harden our hearts, often without us ever really noticing it. At first maybe we just ignore the little things, but after a while as our hearts start to harden bigger and more significant things start to have less and less of an impact on us, until one day we become incapable of feeling much at all. If we are lucky we realise this lack of feeling, but the truth is that there may be times where we do not realise just how hard our hearts have become.
The hardening of a heart can be caused by one of two things; ignoring those around us, or ignoring God. And the truth be told, one usually leads to the other.
When we start ignoring those around us, we begin to switch off to their feelings, to their dreams, and to their needs, and we begin to see people as a commodity to be used and consumed and disposed of. Our hearts begin to dry out and become harder when qualities like compassion and kindness begin to evaporate
When this attitude starts creeping in it is often not long before we start ignoring God.
Rob Bell (the Nooma dude) says that the way we view the creation says a lot about the way we view the creator. When we start turning off to the issues of this world, we start turning off to God.
When we stop caring about others, we stop caring about what God cares about, and slowly this puts us in a position where we begin to block God out of our lives. As we block God out of our lives our hearts begin to harden. The more we choose block God out and ignore that which is important to Him, the harder it is for us to hear God. And as it becomes harder to hear God and communicate with Him, we begin to lose contact with what is important to Him and as our values shift, often ever so imperceptibly to us, our relationship with Him begins to suffer and as a result our relationship with His creations can begin to suffer also.
Take for example the Pharaoh. He cut himself off from God. The more he hardened his heart, the more he started to mistreat the Hebrew people. And the more he mistreated the Hebrew people, the more he cut himself off from God.
Another thing that indicated the hardness of the pharaoh’s heart was that he failed to notice the stink.
We see in 7 that the pharaoh’s magicians were able to use their secret arts to duplicate the plague of frogs that God had sent through Moses, but they could not eradicate the problem, only God could do that.
So Pharaoh begs Moses to get God to remove the plague, and Moses prays and the frogs die. Verse 14 tells us that because of the piles of rotting frogs the land stank. Somehow, even with the stench of rotting frogs all around him, the Pharaoh ignored the warning and hardened his heart once more, blocking God and the things God cares most about out of pharaoh’s concerns.
There are things going on in our world that truly stink. People are oppressed, heartbroken and suffering, and yet much of the world remains uncaring.
Is it possible, that as a group of people humanity has hardened our hearts toward the plight of others?
In failing to notice the stink caused by the rotting frogs, the pharaoh’s hardened heart failed to recognise anything other than the immediate situation at hand.
In the bible passage we see that the pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and asked them to pray for the plague to be removed, but never dealt with the reason for the plague (the enslavement of the Hebrew people).
When we harden our hearts, we become interested in only fixing the problem at hand, not finding the real cause and dealing with that.
Imagine for a moment a child comes to you complaining of a sore arm, in fact it is so sore that they are sobbing with the pain. If all we do is give them some Panadol and send them on their way again, we may have dealt with the immediate issue of the pain, but have not dealt with the thing that is causing the pain, that is the fracture in the bone of the arm. If the arm is broken, X-rays are needed and the correct treatment needs to be performed. By only masking the pain of the situation the arm will never properly heal and will only cause more pain and future problems.
So the pharaoh refused to deal with the real cause of the plagues, instead continuing in his enslavement and abuse of the Hebrew people. Pharaoh continued to refuse to allow the people to leave Egypt and worship God.
The pharaoh’s heart was so hard that no shock alone could correct it. Pharaohs heart needed to be shocked so hard that it had to be broken to be repaired in order to be capable of caring about what God cared about.
In fact it wasn’t until the final plague killed off the firstborn of every Egyptian, including the pharaoh’s own son, a huge shock I am sure, that the pharaoh’s heart was broken enough to allow the Hebrew people to leave.
It occurs to me that a hardened heart is much like an arthritic joint, it is stiff and inflexible.
Sometimes an arthritic joint can be soothed and softened by taking fish oil, maybe it just needed a bit of lubrication.
Other times arthritis requires physical or occupational therapy to loosen it up.
And other times, in the case of really stiff and inflexible joints, the arthritic joint needs replacing all together.
Sometimes I think our hearts become a little hardened and we just need to add a little lubrication to soften it by remembering the plight of others. When we are confronted face to face with hopelessness, and despair, the tears of those we are confronted with can lubricate our hardened hearts and soften them up.
Sometimes we need to undertake a little physical or occupational therapy by actually going out and doing something creative or practical for another person to soften our hardened hearts towards others.
When we do something for another person we begin to invest something of ourselves in them. When we begin to do something for God we begin to invest in Him and as we invest something of ourselves, we begin to make it a priority in our lives, and as things take priority in our lives our hearts begin to soften towards them.
In severe cases of hardened hearts, it may be necessary for God to break our hardened hearts and replace them with a new heart of His own creation in order for us to feel again.
While I worked at the hospital, one operation that was performed with amazing regularity was a hip replacement. I would say that we averaged about 2 a week most of the time, sometimes more.
In a hip replacement the arthritic joint is cut out and replaced by a substitute joint, made from a high strength ceramic or titanium body with synthetic coating created by another company.
This process involves some significant pain and discomfort for the patient in the short term, but the removal of the old joint and the institution of a new joint ultimately leads to more manoeuvrability and a far better quality of life.
When it becomes necessary for God to break our own hardened hearts and replace it with one of His own creating, we may have to endure some short-term pain and discomfort. It is not the most pleasant of things to be suddenly confronted with pain that we have left undealt with in our own lives, and the pain that others experience in their lives, but as we begin to heal and our hearts are softened once again, we find that we have an increased emotional mobility and the quality of our lives will improve.
What choices are you making? Are you choosing to open yourself up to God and those God cares about, or are you choosing to block them off.
Do you notice the stink around you? Can you see the warning signs that things may not be quite right?
How much do you think it would take to soften your heart? Is it already soft? Does it require some lubrication or physical or occupational therapy? Or will your heart need some major reconstructive surgery to be soft again?
When I hear people talking about heart issues, I think of King David in the Old Testament. He was described as a man after Gods own heart, I guess you could say that his heartbeat to the same rhythm as God’s.
David wasn’t perfect, he made some pretty major mistakes when he ignored the priorities of God’s heart and got out of synch, but God would shock him and he when David realised his heart was out of synch he again committed to make God’s priorities his priorities.
Most of the time David’s heart longed for the things God’s heart longed for. And that is the sort of heart I want, a heart that beats to the rhythm of God’s heart, I want to have a heart that longs for the things God longs for.
How is the rhythm of your heart today?
Is it beating in tune with God’s or does it need a little shocking to get back on the right track? Has God shocked you recently?
Before moving to Melbourne to go to the Training College, I worked as an Operating Theatre Technician at the Hobart Private Hospital. My job there was to set up operating theatres for different operations, assist the doctors and nurses to position patients for various operations, ensure that there was an adequate supply of things like Saline and other fluids given by I.V. drips kept warm, help get the patient off the operating table, clean up the mess and get the theatre set up for the next operation.
During this time I had the privilege to observe a number of operations at various degrees of proximity. The closest I got was about 30cm (1 foot) from the operative site as I held a patient in place while they inserted a pacemaker into their heart.
A heart has 4 chambers, the left and right ventricle, and the left and right atrium. The right atrium receives oxygen-depleted blood from the body via the superior vena cava and the inferior vena cava and pumps it through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle.
The right ventricle receives oxygen-depleted blood from the right atrium and pumps it through the pulmonary valve into the lungs via the pulmonary artery.
Then the left atrium receives oxygen-rich blood from the lungs via the pulmonary veins and pumps it through the mitral valve into the left ventricle.
The left ventricle then receives oxygen-rich blood from the left atrium and pumps it through the aortic valve to the entire body via the aorta, including to the heart muscle itself through the coronary arteries.
That’s the way our heart works and why our heart beat is a lub lub sound.
What happens in some people though, is that one of the chambers fibrillates or flutters. When this happens the blood is not pumped around the body properly and the patient starts to get into some pretty serious trouble. To restore a normal or sinus rhythm to the heart something is needed to be done. The first preference is to use drugs like adrenalin to jolt the heart back into a normal rhythm, but in serious cases an electric current is needed to jolt the heart back into normal rhythm. That is why you see defibrillators used on people having a heart attack. A pace maker is like a mini defibrillator, it senses when the heart is getting out of rhythm, and it sends a little jolt into the heart to fix it, most of the time the patient will never know it happened.
As I read the bible I see how God often shocks people to get them to change their heart. In Exodus we see that the Pharaoh needed some serious shocking to change a very hard heart.
Pharaoh was holding the Hebrew people prisoner, and using them as slaves to complete his building projects. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and their terrible treatment they cried out to God to save them.
So God sends Moses, who lets be honest wouldn’t exactly be most people’s top choice (he had a speech impediment, he had killed an Egyptian slave master and was a shepherd, a less than prestigious occupation) to shock the pharaoh into a change of heart and bring freedom to the Hebrew people.
As a result of the pharaoh’s hardened heart and unwillingness to release the Hebrew people, God uses a series of plagues that cover Egypt to try and change the pharaoh’s heart.
Today we are looking at the plague of the Frogs. Now if ever there was a good reason to change your heart, a pile of stinking, rotting frogs has to be high on the list.
On of the most interesting things about the whole plagues of Egypt saga has to be the pharaoh’s response. Each time, after a plague was stopped the Bible tells us that the Pharaoh hardened his heart. Despite the shock of the plague, the pharaoh’s heart remained unchanged.
Three things struck my about the hardening of the pharaoh’s heart. The first was that he made a choice to harden his heart. The Second was that when the pharaoh hardened his heart, he ignored the warning signs around him. And finally the pharaohs heart need to be softened again before he would let the Hebrew people go.
I think it is interesting that the pharaoh chose to harden his heart. He had the choice to allow it to remain soft and release the Hebrew people, but instead after each plague the pharaoh hardened his heart a little more.
While sometimes circumstances around us force us to harden our hearts, I think more often the choices we make slowly harden our hearts, often without us ever really noticing it. At first maybe we just ignore the little things, but after a while as our hearts start to harden bigger and more significant things start to have less and less of an impact on us, until one day we become incapable of feeling much at all. If we are lucky we realise this lack of feeling, but the truth is that there may be times where we do not realise just how hard our hearts have become.
The hardening of a heart can be caused by one of two things; ignoring those around us, or ignoring God. And the truth be told, one usually leads to the other.
When we start ignoring those around us, we begin to switch off to their feelings, to their dreams, and to their needs, and we begin to see people as a commodity to be used and consumed and disposed of. Our hearts begin to dry out and become harder when qualities like compassion and kindness begin to evaporate
When this attitude starts creeping in it is often not long before we start ignoring God.
Rob Bell (the Nooma dude) says that the way we view the creation says a lot about the way we view the creator. When we start turning off to the issues of this world, we start turning off to God.
When we stop caring about others, we stop caring about what God cares about, and slowly this puts us in a position where we begin to block God out of our lives. As we block God out of our lives our hearts begin to harden. The more we choose block God out and ignore that which is important to Him, the harder it is for us to hear God. And as it becomes harder to hear God and communicate with Him, we begin to lose contact with what is important to Him and as our values shift, often ever so imperceptibly to us, our relationship with Him begins to suffer and as a result our relationship with His creations can begin to suffer also.
Take for example the Pharaoh. He cut himself off from God. The more he hardened his heart, the more he started to mistreat the Hebrew people. And the more he mistreated the Hebrew people, the more he cut himself off from God.
Another thing that indicated the hardness of the pharaoh’s heart was that he failed to notice the stink.
We see in 7 that the pharaoh’s magicians were able to use their secret arts to duplicate the plague of frogs that God had sent through Moses, but they could not eradicate the problem, only God could do that.
So Pharaoh begs Moses to get God to remove the plague, and Moses prays and the frogs die. Verse 14 tells us that because of the piles of rotting frogs the land stank. Somehow, even with the stench of rotting frogs all around him, the Pharaoh ignored the warning and hardened his heart once more, blocking God and the things God cares most about out of pharaoh’s concerns.
There are things going on in our world that truly stink. People are oppressed, heartbroken and suffering, and yet much of the world remains uncaring.
Is it possible, that as a group of people humanity has hardened our hearts toward the plight of others?
In failing to notice the stink caused by the rotting frogs, the pharaoh’s hardened heart failed to recognise anything other than the immediate situation at hand.
In the bible passage we see that the pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and asked them to pray for the plague to be removed, but never dealt with the reason for the plague (the enslavement of the Hebrew people).
When we harden our hearts, we become interested in only fixing the problem at hand, not finding the real cause and dealing with that.
Imagine for a moment a child comes to you complaining of a sore arm, in fact it is so sore that they are sobbing with the pain. If all we do is give them some Panadol and send them on their way again, we may have dealt with the immediate issue of the pain, but have not dealt with the thing that is causing the pain, that is the fracture in the bone of the arm. If the arm is broken, X-rays are needed and the correct treatment needs to be performed. By only masking the pain of the situation the arm will never properly heal and will only cause more pain and future problems.
So the pharaoh refused to deal with the real cause of the plagues, instead continuing in his enslavement and abuse of the Hebrew people. Pharaoh continued to refuse to allow the people to leave Egypt and worship God.
The pharaoh’s heart was so hard that no shock alone could correct it. Pharaohs heart needed to be shocked so hard that it had to be broken to be repaired in order to be capable of caring about what God cared about.
In fact it wasn’t until the final plague killed off the firstborn of every Egyptian, including the pharaoh’s own son, a huge shock I am sure, that the pharaoh’s heart was broken enough to allow the Hebrew people to leave.
It occurs to me that a hardened heart is much like an arthritic joint, it is stiff and inflexible.
Sometimes an arthritic joint can be soothed and softened by taking fish oil, maybe it just needed a bit of lubrication.
Other times arthritis requires physical or occupational therapy to loosen it up.
And other times, in the case of really stiff and inflexible joints, the arthritic joint needs replacing all together.
Sometimes I think our hearts become a little hardened and we just need to add a little lubrication to soften it by remembering the plight of others. When we are confronted face to face with hopelessness, and despair, the tears of those we are confronted with can lubricate our hardened hearts and soften them up.
Sometimes we need to undertake a little physical or occupational therapy by actually going out and doing something creative or practical for another person to soften our hardened hearts towards others.
When we do something for another person we begin to invest something of ourselves in them. When we begin to do something for God we begin to invest in Him and as we invest something of ourselves, we begin to make it a priority in our lives, and as things take priority in our lives our hearts begin to soften towards them.
In severe cases of hardened hearts, it may be necessary for God to break our hardened hearts and replace them with a new heart of His own creation in order for us to feel again.
While I worked at the hospital, one operation that was performed with amazing regularity was a hip replacement. I would say that we averaged about 2 a week most of the time, sometimes more.
In a hip replacement the arthritic joint is cut out and replaced by a substitute joint, made from a high strength ceramic or titanium body with synthetic coating created by another company.
This process involves some significant pain and discomfort for the patient in the short term, but the removal of the old joint and the institution of a new joint ultimately leads to more manoeuvrability and a far better quality of life.
When it becomes necessary for God to break our own hardened hearts and replace it with one of His own creating, we may have to endure some short-term pain and discomfort. It is not the most pleasant of things to be suddenly confronted with pain that we have left undealt with in our own lives, and the pain that others experience in their lives, but as we begin to heal and our hearts are softened once again, we find that we have an increased emotional mobility and the quality of our lives will improve.
What choices are you making? Are you choosing to open yourself up to God and those God cares about, or are you choosing to block them off.
Do you notice the stink around you? Can you see the warning signs that things may not be quite right?
How much do you think it would take to soften your heart? Is it already soft? Does it require some lubrication or physical or occupational therapy? Or will your heart need some major reconstructive surgery to be soft again?
When I hear people talking about heart issues, I think of King David in the Old Testament. He was described as a man after Gods own heart, I guess you could say that his heartbeat to the same rhythm as God’s.
David wasn’t perfect, he made some pretty major mistakes when he ignored the priorities of God’s heart and got out of synch, but God would shock him and he when David realised his heart was out of synch he again committed to make God’s priorities his priorities.
Most of the time David’s heart longed for the things God’s heart longed for. And that is the sort of heart I want, a heart that beats to the rhythm of God’s heart, I want to have a heart that longs for the things God longs for.
How is the rhythm of your heart today?
Is it beating in tune with God’s or does it need a little shocking to get back on the right track? Has God shocked you recently?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
