I was resting in the doctor’s office room at the urgent care I went to for a physical. The waxy protective paper covered the pillow as well as the bed I was laying on. Rest doesn’t exactly come easy in that environment, but I had to get my blood pressure down a little bit to fulfill the parameters set down for passing the physical. I wasn’t terribly optimistic it would work! I asked Jesus that if it pleased his will he might calm my soul and slow my heart. The more I thought about “just relaxing” the more I felt nervous about not being able to. But then our Lord answered my prayers. As I lay there listening to the beating of my heart a thought entered my mind. In the past I have heard Jesus speak to me in my inner being (not very often!), but it wasn’t exactly like that. I felt like it was more like an inspired thought that Jesus gave me. It went thusly:

Every beat of your heart echoes in the eternity of my love.

Meditating on that calmed me down quite a bit, and then I began to think about the idea. I realized that by virtue of the human heart of God, every beat of every human heart echoes in the eternity of his love. Even those heartbeats spent on and multiplied by rage, lust, envy, vindictiveness, judgment and every kind of sin have been redeemed by Jesus Christ the Son of God. That is the wonderful, beautiful, hopeful, and living part of the story, the part that ought to burn a desire in us to love God with every bit of strength we have left. The other part is so very sad, and it has to do with all of the times we have spent those heartbeats on rejecting his love, and even those who will never again have a chance to turn back to his love on account of having damned themselves to eternal fire. They made their choice, but we can still choose to accept God’s grace by opening our hearts, hearts that sin, but that have been redeemed nonetheless by the sacrificial power of his love, a love into which echoes every beat of every heart living in this whole wild world.

Oh yeah! I passed the test as the next time the nurse came in my blood pressure had dropped dramatically.