My Heart and Comfort Verses Freebie

Seeing God's Faithfulness in Every Beat

The past month has been one of the most difficult seasons of my life.

In late January, an ice storm swept through our area (Middle TN). Within days we had to leave our home and move into our daughter's house. Four days later we returned to check on things and discovered that frozen pipes had burst. Water had flooded three bedrooms.

Suddenly we were displaced. Homeless.

The damage was severe enough that repairs may take nine months, so we made the painful and costly decision to purchase another house. Everything felt unstable, not just the walls around us, but the ground beneath us.

But the trials did not stop there.

When My Body Began to Speak

In the middle of the stress, my heart began throwing PVCs (premature ventricular contractions). Extra beats. Interruptions in the rhythm.

At first there were only a few. Then they came more often.

I have a long history of heart problems ( open-heart surgery, stents, an ablation) so  this frightened me deeply. I knew my heart's history. I knew all the places it had been repaired. And now it felt like it was stuttering again.

Tests followed. Hospital visits. Blood work. A heart catheterization. An echocardiogram.

We discovered anemia and electrolyte imbalances, so I began a protocol of magnesium and minerals. But even after addressing those issues, the pounding beats continued. Extra. Jarring. Relentless.

Saying Goodbye to My Father

While we were house hunting, my father suddenly became ill.

My dad was ninety-four years old, but he had been living with a kind of holy vitality -- shopping, driving, embracing every ordinary day as the gift it was. He was present in a way that made the world feel more steady.

Within a short time he entered hospice care.

I flew to Florida knowing, with the knowledge that only daughters carry, that this trip would likely be my final goodbye. 

At the same time, three of my nine children were walking through their own valleys. My phone never stopped ringing. I spent hours on the phone -- listening, praying, trying to pour out what I was not sure I had left. A mother's love doesn't pause for her own grief.

Then Friday came.

My father passed away.

I sat in the quiet with that truth for a long time. 

When Grief Hits the Body

Grief does strange things to the body. My heart rhythm, which had been throwing four to six extra beats per minute, suddenly jumped to twenty or more. That's over 10,000 times a day. 

The Bible knows this. "My heart is in anguish within me," the psalmist cried. "The terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me." Psalm 55:4-5

David was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing what grief actually does to flesh and bone.

The thumping was relentless.

Every pause... Every heavy beat... Every sudden jolt inside my chest felt like a warning, a danger signal, an alarm I could not silence.

Anxiety layered itself over grief. Hospitals have always been a deep trigger for me -- the antiseptic smell, the beeping monitors, the fluorescent light that makes everyone look frightened. My mind raced with dark imaginings. What if I stroke? What if I become disabled? What if my body is telling me something my doctors have missed?

It felt like everything was unraveling at once.

The house. My father. My children. My heart.

But through all of it, I was praying. Asking God for guidance. Asking Him to calm what I could not calm myself. Then feeling guilt because I wasn't trusting God enough. 

And in His tender mercy, He answered—not with silence of the chaos, but with sight to see inside it. (He does that a lot!)

The Revelation in the Research

While lying awake in the small hours, I began researching PVCs. What I discovered stopped me completely.

Those extra beats—the ones that had been terrifying me—are not the heart losing control. They are small electrical sparks that fire early, out of turn. They interrupt the rhythm for a moment.

But they do not replace the heart's true pacemaker.

The true pacemaker holds its position. It does not yield.

And after the interruption—after the premature beat— the heart resets itself. The true pacemaker reasserts the rhythm. The beat continues, steady and faithful, as it has since before I drew my first breath.

The interruption does not win.

The rhythm is restored.

I sat with that truth for a long time.

If I am having 10,000 extra beats a day, then something extraordinary is also happening:

10,000 times a day, my heart is correcting itself. 10,000 times a day, the design God breathed into my body is overriding the interruption and restoring the rhythm.

What I had been calling a sign of my heart failing was, in fact, a sign of my heart persisting.

God's Pacemaker

Inside the heart, nestled in the upper right chamber, there is a tiny cluster of cells called the sinoatrial node.

Medical textbooks call it the SA node. I now call it God's pacemaker.

This small collection of cells quietly sends electrical signals 60 to 100 times every minute. It does this when you are sleeping. It does this when you are weeping. It does this when the world has collapsed around you and you cannot find the floor.

You never have to tell it to start. You never have to remind it to keep going. You never have to believe hard enough for it to continue.

It simply beats -- faithfully, wordlessly, without ceasing -- because the God who knit you together in your mother's womb designed it to do exactly that.

The psalmist wrote: "You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Psalm 139:13-14

Fearfully and wonderfully made.

Your heart, right now, beating in your chest— that is not a biological accident. That is God's craftsmanship. That is His sustaining hand, moment by moment, beat by beat, holding you inside the life He gave you.

God rarely silences the storm first. He gives you new eyes to see Him in it. The beat didn't change. My perspective did. And that changed everything.

The Instrument and the Composer

I have been thinking about the heart like a musical instrument.

When fear, stress, and grief tighten the nervous system, it is as if the strings of the instrument are wound too tight. The music becomes strained. Chaotic. The notes clash against one another.

But the Composer has not left the room.

He has not stepped away from the instrument.

He is still there—patient, unhurried— waiting for the strings to loosen, waiting for the body to remember what the soul is learning: that He holds this.

When the nervous system quiets, the instrument settles. The music steadies. Not because the trials have ended, but because the One who designed the instrument is still sovereign over the song.

There is a beautiful word in Hebrew for this: shalom. We translate it as peace, but it means far more than the absence of conflict. Shalom is wholeness. Completeness. Every part in right relationship with every other part.

My heart, even in its stumbling, is reaching for shalom.

And the God who designed it is faithful to restore it.

Sustained in the Night

As I lay down to sleep that night, after the research, after the weeping, after the long quiet,  I held onto a promise I have known for years but felt differently in that hour:

"I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me." Psalm 3:5

The Hebrew word translated "sustains" is samak— to support, to hold up, to lean upon. It is the word used for laying hands on an offering, pressing your weight into something solid.

The Lord was not merely keeping me alive. He was holding me up. He was receiving the weight of everything I could not carry.

And for the first time in weeks, I slept deeply. Eight uninterrupted hours. My body, at last, trusted what my spirit had been trying to believe.

This morning, my heart was calm. My physical heart is still throwing PVCs. But my spiritual heart is experiencing something my circumstances cannot touch —a shalom that is not dependent on the rhythm being perfect, only on the Pacemaker remaining faithful.

Every Beat Is a Mercy

Sometimes we only notice our heart when something feels wrong.

We walk through years, decades, an entire life -- and the faithful work of the heart goes unnoticed, unremarked, ungiven thanks for.

But every single heartbeat is an act of grace.

Every beat is the Creator saying, not yet—I still have purposes for you here.

Every beat is the sustaining hand of the One who numbers our days, who holds our breath, who has written every one of them in His book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16).

"In Him we live and move and have our being." Acts 17:28

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally, physically, biologically—in Him we live.

The oxygen in your lungs. The blood moving through your veins. The small electrical spark in the SA node that fires right now, and now, and now again.

All of it sustained by the One who spoke the universe into being and has not once looked away from you.

A New Way to Receive Each Beat

So now, as I write these words, my heart is still thumping, I know my new trust perspective is due to the many wonderful prayers I have been receiving from my Bible study friends. 

I reach for wonder.

Because that beat is telling me something true: the pacemaker is holding. The rhythm is being restored. The God who designed this heart is still at work inside it.

Every interruption followed by correction is a parable written in my own chest.

Chaos does not get the final word. Grief does not override the design. The Composer is still keeping time.

And when the day comes that my heart beats its last beat, that will not be a failure of God's faithfulness either. That will be the moment He calls the instrument home— and gives me, at last, the heart that will never need correcting again.

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Revelation 21:4

Until that day, I will listen to my heart differently.

Not as an alarm, but as a witness.

A witness to the God who sustains. Who restores. Who holds.

And who is, right now, faithfully keeping time.

"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits -- who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy." Psalm 103:2-4

Thanks to My Bible Study Sisters

As I am writing these words, my heart is pounding. It feels like it could jump out of my chest.

I have not arrived at some calm, healed place where fear no longer whispers. I am still in it.

But something is different now.

I am not reaching for fear the way I once did. I know why. It is not my own strength or my own resolve. It is the prayers of my Bible study sisters, faithful women who have been lifting my name before the Father day after day. Their prayers have been a kind of external pacemaker for my soul, keeping the rhythm steady when I could not do it myself.

That is what the body of Christ does.

"The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." James 5:16

I have felt that power. It is real. Thank you dear ones. 

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