Heart-break

The world is a terrible place.

No. It's not the world--it's what's become of the world through the fall of man.

I have a close friend whose father passed away last night--suddenly and unexpectedly. Put simply his heart was broken and crushed under the pressures of this world.

Cardiac arrest is the technical term; or an infarction of the heart causing local death of the tissue.

Of course my heart goes out to my friend and her family, but strangely enough I've found my heart responding most intensely to this man and the condition of his heart that led to its destruction. What state does a heart have to be in in order to succumb to defeat?

We talk about heart-break, heart-ache, heart-sick, and we feel things in our hearts when someone is born, dies, hurts us or lifts us up. A movie can stir our hearts and a song can touch it. Someone can bring joy to it and someone else can crush it.

Medically speaking it's just an organ--a dense, muscular organ that pushes and pulls life giving blood through our body prompted by an electrical impulse. It started to form at conception and first began to primitively beat at 4 weeks gestation pushing immature red-blood cells through the body's immature and barely formed arteries and veins. It delivered oxygen from the mother via the umilical cord to the growing tissues and removed the left-over carbon dioxide back to the mother via the umbilical cord for her to exhale.

At birth it switches over from a fetal heart that bypasses the unused fetal lungs into an infants heart as the pressure from the air being sucked into the lungs closes off now-obsolete pathways. Our first breath initializes our first independant heart beats--seperate from our mother's as the cord is cut and the flow of life-giving oxygen is terminated from her end.

Then as we age our heart grows.
It builds up fatty-deposits and sometimes skips beats or beats irregularly.
It gets broken. It gets healed.

It's just an organ but it's so much more.
It can be broken beyond recognition. It can give up of its own will.