The Real Epiphany Every New Year Needs (Through Storms & Broken Hearts & Heart Surgeries)

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The Real Epiphany Every New Year Needs (Through Storms & Broken Hearts & Heart Surgeries)

It’s grey and overcast the morning of the Epiphany, the day of the new year when we turn to mark the three kings coming with their gifts for Jesus, gifts for Light coming into the World for all of us.

And I keep humming it in the early light on the farm:

“What can I give him?
Poor as I am
If I were a shepherd… “

That’s the one line rounding my mind as I tramped through bleak midwinter knee-high drifts in a once-in-a-generation snowstorm, during that midnight hour moving from Christmas Eve to the first moments of Christmas Morn, as I had made my one last check on new lambs, on the whole flock, in the howling, blizzarding dark.

That little girl of ours, whom I’d just tucked in under a glimmer of Christmas tree lights, she was supposed to check in at cardiac in the city hospital during the week of Christmas, for a 6 hour heart ablation.

“Could there be an absolutely more perfect Christmas gift — to get a new heart? ” a friend had smiled gentle, and an ablation is definitely not a heart transplant, which is someday on our horizon, but I got what she was saying about the heart ablation — and in a moment, more than a few fears of mine had melted away.

The week of Christmas had loomed large on our calendar for months: a heart ablation before any Christmas celebration.

We’d explained to our little Shiloh the why, explained to her the how and what of this heart ablation, the need to burn and cauterize that electrical currents that keep jolting her heart to race in wild arrhythmias.

There are days we need to slow our hearts down, to settle down, waiting for Holy Love come down.

All we all wanted for Christmas is a new heart.

Not some new slippers or new mittens or any new techno-gadgets that made some top-ten list.

That’s at the heart of every new year:

In all our heartache for a different story, all our heart longings for more happiness and less failing, all our heart break over all the hard battles in a broken world — all we all long for is a whole and perfect heart.

In all our heartache for a different story, all our heart longings for more happiness and less failing, all our heart break over all the hard battles in a broken world — all we all long for is a whole and perfect heart.

Her cardiologist had unexpectedly called, just right after I’d again confirmed our 3 night reservation in the city, and the re-arranged calendars of our whole family of more than 10, all meeting in the big city the day before her pre-op appointments, and before the 6 hour heart procedure, to make memories together with her in Christmas markets, and up and down candy cane lanes, and through lit gingerbread villages, to carve laughing memories together even deeper into our hearts.

But then her cardiac conference team had reviewed her file one more time.

That’s why the cardiologist was calling me now:

There would be no heart ablation.

Considering everything again, her team made a different call: the risk of dislodging a blood clot, of actually causing a stroke, were considered too high.

“No new heart for Christmas?” She’d asked me with big eyes, and I’d stroked her cheek so gentle, her eyes trying to read mine, and I so wish there was a way to give her heart a new rhythm.

Sitting in the manger straw, in the blustery storm of Christmas Eve giving way to Christmas Morn, stroking the nuzzling cheeks of newborn lambs…all I could think is:

There is literally nothing in all the world I wish I could give our one little wondrous girl more than an ablation and brand new heart rhythm, a new heart with a perfect beat, a steady rhythm, strong and sure and whole. I’m wild to give her long life and more years and certain hope and a new lease on being fully alive, forget whatever you can order, buy, wrap, or return for another size — what the girl needs is a steadied heart.

And on Christmas morn in a storm in the barn with my lambs, here I am, thinking of what I’m desperate to give her, with those words of the chorus ringing like Christmas bells in my head, about what I can actually give Him:

“What can I give him?
Poor as I am
If I were a shepherd
I would give Him a lamb…

If I were a wise man
I would do my part
Yet what can I give him —
Give Him my heart
Give Him my heart.”

One of my lambs lays its head in my open hand, and it’s repeating like a thrumming beat: “Give Him your heart, give Him your heart.”

The Maker of stars, who strung together constellations like diamonds on strings, birthed whole whirling galaxies into being with only a Word, who breathed on to a heap of dust and a human heart began to beat, He is the Gift Giver who already has everything, because He is everything, who made everything, and all He wants in the whole cosmos is the gift of your heart.

Heavenly Love broke into this world to divinely mend all the broken hearts with His.

A shepherd may give the Babe-God a lamb, but the One born in a manger, surrounded by sheep, He is nothing less than the Lamb of God who came to be the Good Shepherd who’d rather die than abandon one of His lambs, the Lamb of God who came to lay down His life because He’s the only One who’s ever loved you to death, the One who is the Lion of Judah on the throne who devours death and raises His own to eternal life, the Lamb of God born into our stinking mess, only to be the King who redeems every mess we’ve ever known.

Do not doubt that real mystery and miracle met in a manger…. and meet in the muck and mire of every single new year.

Heavenly Love broke into this world to divinely mend all the broken hearts with His. Only this Jesus is the Lamb of God who whispers:

Dare give me the gift of your whole heart, and I’ll give you mine and make you whole.

Dare give the Lamb in the manger the gift of your failing heart, and the Lamb won’t fail to give you a new, whole heart.

The new heart we’re wild for, is the new heart we get, because the Lamb in the manger is more than wild enough with a love of us that He’s come to give us His.

That’s always the epiphany: Whatever is going down this New Year, whatever was under the Christmas Tree, because the Lamb in the manger went to Calvary’s Tree, what this old heartbroken world can get for Christmas, for a New Year, is honest new hearts.

The brave woman who honestly can’t bear much more, the man who is, frankly, sick and tired of navigating too much, the tender relationship that’s been bruised and beaten up by much more pain than anyone signed up for, the parent whose carrying much more unspoken broken than they’ll ever have words for… and the little girl whose heart slam races much too fast …

That’s the revelation at the start of every New Year:

The new heart we’re wild for, is the new heart we get, because the Lamb in the manger is more than wild enough with a love of us that He’s come to give us His.

After I had left my new lambs under Christmas stars, and waded through snow up to my hips, all the way back to the house, I had sat a bit with our little girl sleeping in the defiant light of the Christmas tree, our little girl who needs a heart made new.

And by Epiphany, that Christmas carol, “In the Bleak Midwinter” whisper-changed its steadying refrain in my heart, us all coming with the 3 Kings to to Christ and the Light of Him, us all coming with our limping New Year’s resolution and our hopes and fears for this coming next year:

Because He is the Shepherd,
He gives us Himself, the Lamb,

Because He is the wisest,
He does the whole part,

Because what does He give us,
Just what we need most,

He gives us a new heart,
He gives us His heart.

There’s the only real epiphany and truest revelation that any dark or New Year needs…. and the storm begins to melt away and now all the days start moving toward the light.

For your new year, from my heart to yours:

Stories that Loan Strength,
that are Signposts that Point to the Light…
Books for a Better Year…

It’s healing good to be on The Way with you…