Tiny Hearts and Language Barriers

Departing from the office work I have been doing since arriving here, this week I shadowed a pediatric cardiologist from the states, in Iraq on a medical mission. Receiving a crash course in medical scribing, I took patient histories, recorded all of Dr. Kirk’s notes, and observed countless ECHOs and heart exams. Despite being emotionally exhausting, the week proved incredible, giving faces and meaning to the statistics I’ve been typing up in the office, teaching me to hear different heart murmurs, and inspiring in me a new calling. Mom, Dad, I want to be a translator.

Don’t get me wrong, my limited Kurdish still consists of awkward introductory remarks and ordering one type of food. My brain truly is not wired for foreign language acquisition, but I witnessed two types of translation this week, and the latter requires no language skills. Let me explain. ..

I can’t think of anything that appears more terrifying than parenthood. This week I was scared to even consider putting myself in the shoes of the mothers and fathers of children with broken hearts. How can you love someone so very much, wanting to give everything you can to your child, and be so utterly helpless to translate that love into tangible change? The pain I saw overwhelmed me. I don’t doubt the incredible strength of a parent’s love, but it can’t physically close a hole in your daughter’s right ventricle, or correct your son’s transposed arteries.

Fortunately, a surgeon’s hands can.  A heart surgeon’s knowledge and passion and skill can translate parents’ loving desire for their child to have a long, healthy life into the reality of a strongly pumping heart. What if we all viewed our careers and friendships and families and lives as similar services for “translation”? 

God works in often frustratingly mysterious ways, but there’s quite a bit of evidence that his fatherly loving desire for his broken-hearted children includes the world being daily made right. Sometimes that means physical healing of a small heart, sometimes it means peace in a violent place, sometimes it means His children coming to know Him. And instead of accomplishing those desires on his own (which he could do much more cleanly and in a trillionth of a second, no sweat), he lets us in as partners on his work of daily Redeeming. As agents of His love communicated to this world, aren’t well all in essence  just translators of his plan?

I don’t yet have the skills to translate God’s love into a physically healed heart.  But no matter the career or stage of life any of us are in, we can daily translate his love into tangible actions that make the world a bit more right. Jesus interpreted Love into our language, so we can follow his example to not just translate that Love into words, but into action. “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters.”  Later on in 1 John, we are reminded that “Such love has no fear.” If we can learn to trust each other and God to translate perfect love into the promised rightness of the world, maybe the helplessness I saw in so many parents’ eyes will be less of a reality.

Next week I’ll be back in the office, crunching numbers and writing drafts of reports. But viewing it as God’s work spoken in the language of a business, necessary for the service and love PLC provides, it is not mundane, and just as incredible a job to be able to perform as a heart surgery.