In which I talk about (heart) failure.

This week, I was underwater. Figuratively, that is. I was being pulled in a bunch of different directions. Deadlines were coming up for research projects, final exams were looming, the house was discovered to be infested with childhood memorabilia, and I ended up sleeping only three to four hours a few times this week. It took me until Thursday morning, after blatantly head-nodding sleeping through an entire lecture, I realized why I felt so stressed. I was miserable, genuinely unhappy, for the first time in a long time. That realization startled me, because I’m generally a happy person. If one thing is not going well, I’ll focus on something else and keep on trucking. So I decided to introspect a little further. Why am I unhappy?

Part of it was the sense of hopelessness I had about coding my app. I didn’t have a good way to go on, and many people were waiting on my work to move on with their goals. There were expectations riding on my completion of this app for months, and I couldn’t see a way to meet them. Then there was dread — I need a workable product by May, and I don’t even have a full set of starting materials. I was failing to deliver.

Then there was the nebulous unknown of the cardio final. Of course, the fogginess was the fault of my sleeping in class and not doing the assigned readings. I was putting in an average of 4 hours of studying a day, which I deem sufficient, but there was the sneaking fear — is it enough?

Those are the big guns. Then there were the little things. Empty fridge. Walking the dog. Why is the car not there when I need it? “Could you — ” “Yeah, sure!” Backaches. Friends who wanted to grab lunch, when I really just wanted to grab a nap in the quiet study room.

Switch gears. In left-sided congestive heart failure, the heart is unable to pump all the blood that the body is pushing towards it. Either it’s unable to produce as much force as before, or it’s stretched beyond capacity by a high volume of blood, or both. One by one, each chamber of the heart gets filled to bursting, until eventually blood starts to clog up the vessels in the lungs. Then the patient shows up short of breath. No matter how many times you breathe in a minute, you still feel like you’re choking. You’re surrounded by air, but you’re drowning in your own personal cistern.

The solution? Some drugs reduce the amount of fluid volume you have in your body. Diuretics and ACE inhibitors help you pee it out, and your distended heart can relax a little. Others buck up your tired heart muscles and give them a pep talk — let’s beat fewer times per minute, but we’re going to beat harder each time. Quality over quantity, say the beta blockers. Some other drugs draw blood away of the heart by enlarging other blood vessels both before and after the heart — veno and vasodilators.

Switch back. On Thursday, I had just had it. I couldn’t breathe. I was calling on the Lord, but I think I had a faulty connection. It didn’t seem to make a difference. My friend finally asked me, “Why can’t you just tell them you can’t do it?” I thought about it. Yeah, why didn’t I just say that? Why didn’t I ask for help instead of trying to shoulder everything by myself (complaining all the while)? I think the Lord was trying to get it through my stubbornly independent skull that I couldn’t do this on my own.

So Thursday afternoon to Friday, I asked friends for help. They all came through. I told my professor, “I can’t do it! I need help.” I was directed to two different sources for help. Then I asked for more help from a former mentor. Boom. Two more sources of help. I looked online. Help. I told my mom I needed help. Help. Suddenly, a month-and-a-half seemed like a reasonable time in which to develop an app. The house and its trappings were a finite number of boxes. The engulfing tides were receding; I was high and dry.

I had over-spiritualized my problem, I think. I had read the verse, “I can do all things in Him who gives me strength” and clung on to the first half with only a shallow understanding of the second half. I thought, if I can just keep getting God as my fuel, if I call on His name, He will keep me going. But in my mental paradigm, I was the one fetching the fuel. I was the one calling the Lord, “to me!” This week, I discovered that all my efforts were drowning out the Lord’s calling to me: “come unto Me, and rest.” I was trying so hard to fulfill the Bible’s promises, but if they’re true, don’t I trust the Lord to fulfill them for me?

As I was driving to the meeting this morning, I was reminded of the progression in Song of Songs. The female narrator, sometimes referred to as the lover, starts out as a delinquent field-tender (1:6). But after falling in love with her beloved, she is drawn out of her introspection and languor to follow after Him. Her beloved’s description of her undergoes a transformation from a wild horse to a lily to a dove to a pillar of smoke coming out of the wilderness to a garden to an army terrible with banners. In one of the final comparisons, the Beloved asks, “who is this who comes up from the wilderness, leaning on her beloved?” One would think that the consummation of such a dynamic romance would lead to the lover becoming a strong, powerful woman. All hints were pointing that way (especially the army with banners line). She could fight, she could dazzle, she could terrify. But in the end, she leans on her beloved. I believe she isn’t leaning out of her weakness. After all that growth, how could she be weak? She has realized all her strength is nothing without her beloved. One of the last things she says to her beloved is, “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields… let us rise up early for the vineyards;” (7:11–12). Not only has she grown in strength, but she has learned to work with her beloved in the fields, and love doing so.

I’m afraid I only know how to work alone. I might say I’m relying on the Lord and leaning on Him, but when the rubber meets the road, I zoom off “in His name” without much weight of reality. My problem is not that I lack divine fuel, but I lack love for the Lord. The lover in Song of Songs doesn’t lean on her beloved because she has no other recourse or no other choice, but because she loves him with everything that she is. How can I be like that, too? I can only pray, as I read before in a book:

Amen, Lord. I can’t do it anymore. Lord, I love You! Do it in me.