Every time I got close to falling asleep, I was awakened by pain in my chest and my shoulder. Really sharp pains in my chest. I stood up for a minute and it kind of backed off, so I figured, alright, whatever that was, we're good. Then I laid back down and it came right back. Every time I laid down, I felt the same sharp pain in my shoulder, seemingly intensifying. So I got up again. Eased up again. Laid back down, and there it was.
The entire time I really thought it was kind of like heartburn or something. That's honestly where my head was. It was 2:00am on New Year's, it was late, we'd eaten good, and I’ve had more than my share of alcoholic beverages. Heartburn. That's what I'm telling myself standing there in the dark going up and down like it's some kind of drill.
That's when my wife asked me if we need to go to the hospital.
That wasn't my first one. The first heart attack was back in 2015, and this one was New Year's Eve 2020 going into New Year's Day 2021. So you've got a man who had already had the big obvious wake up call before, and there he is years later in his own bedroom doing the up and down with his own chest and calling it heartburn.
I wasn't being dumb about it. Or, I shouldn't say that, maybe I was a little. What I mean is I wasn't ignoring it out of stubbornness. I genuinely did not see it. I had a full life going, a lot of motion, kids and work and business and all of it moving at once, and when everything's moving you kind of assume it's all fine.
Let me back up, though, because this is the part I had wrong for years.
Nothing got fixed that night. Nothing in my body changed in that bedroom. Whatever was going on in there had been going on a while. Months. Probably a lot longer than months, I don't really know. That stuff doesn't show up on New Year's because you had a big dinner. It'd been building the whole time I was busy feeling fine.
So the pain didn't make any of that true. The pain just turned the light on in a room that already had all the furniture in it.
And I've told this story wrong before. I used to tell it like, here's the night everything changed, here's my wake up call, here's where I decided to get my life together. That's a good story. It's just not what happened. I've spent years handing it credit for work it never actually did.
Now, two years or so ago I started reading the Bible more and 1 word kept standing out to me scattered all throughout the Old and New Testament. The word was “Walk”, Walk with God, Walk before God, etc. In Hebrew the word commonly used for walking is halak. It means to walk, to live, to conduct yourself. It's about the walking, the going, where a life is headed. I decided to do a deeper study about it.
This article, and the next several articles, is coming out of what I've actually been studying. The surprising part is day one of that study wasn't a verse about a man at all. It was Genesis 2:14. "And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria." That's one line out of a longer list of rivers. A geography note, sitting in the middle of Eden.
But that word goeth is halak. הַהֹלֵךְ. And that's the first time it shows up anywhere in the Bible. God walking in the garden is second. Enoch is third and fourth. Noah is fifth. The first time Scripture uses the word that ends up meaning the whole life of faith, it's pointing at a river.
Back up four verses and there's a river coming out of Eden to water the garden, and it splits into four, and Hiddekel is the third one. So the thing's got a job. It's watering something. And they're each headed somewhere in particular, even if Hiddekel is the only one we get told about, which means that's not water wandering around out there, it's water that got sent. And all of that's chapter two, before the Fall, before anything had gone wrong yet, before there was even anybody around to watch it.
Somewhere in there I wrote a line down in my notes and then didn't think about it again for a long time. "Much human restlessness is real motion with no destination, a flood, not a river."
Real motion. A flood isn't fake. There's actual water in it, plenty of it, moving fast, and it'll tear up a city in an afternoon and leave you cleaning up for months. Nobody looks at a flood and says that water's being lazy. It's just that nobody dug it anywhere to go, so it goes everywhere, and everywhere ends up being the same thing as nowhere.
That's what got me about halak, and it took the flood for me to see it. It's not a word about speed. Not one part of it is about how fast. A flood has all the speed. The problem is it lacks direction.
I'd say a lot of us are running four or five floods at a time and calling it a full calendar.
A river's got that same water in it. Sometimes a whole lot less of it than a flood has. The only real difference is there's a bed underneath a river, a groove already cut into the ground, and the water is mostly just doing what the groove tells it.
The other line I wrote down that same day: the riverbed was dug before the water arrived.
Because the way I'd always had it in my head, I was the guy who was supposed to come up with a direction for my life. Sit down, think hard, pick something, go. But the water in a river doesn't invent its route. It shows up and finds one already cut. The current is real and the moving is real, and the shape of the thing got set before the water ever got there, by a hundred slow things that happened while nobody was watching.
There was already a course under me. Years of a certain way of eating, a certain amount of sitting still, a certain way of carrying stress and not saying anything about it, all of it quietly cutting a groove while I was busy being in motion. I didn't pick a direction that night. I looked down and saw the one I'd been running in the whole time. And through the grace of God I got to see it before it finished the job.
I still think about that bedroom. Standing up and the pain letting go. Lying back down and it coming right back. Up, down, up, down, and me running it through my head as heartburn the entire time, because heartburn is a thing that happens to a guy who's fine.
We went to the hospital. My wife wasn't really asking, if I'm being honest about it. And there's a lot I could say about what came after that, but the piece I keep coming back to is smaller than all of it.
So here's the small thing I do now.
Before the week starts, usually Sunday night, or Monday morning if Sunday got away from me, I write down one place I'm actually trying to end up that week. Not a task list. I've got plenty of those and they're all full. One destination. This week it's walk at lunch, every day. Something I can point at on Friday and say yeah, we got closer to that, or no, we didn't.
Then on the walk, I pick the turnaround point before I leave the house. An actual spot. The stop sign, the second light, the corner by the church. Not a step count and not a timer. A place. Because a step count is a flood, I mean it's real work and real numbers and it's genuinely good for you, it just goes everywhere. A stop sign is a bed. I get there, I turn around, I come home. It just knows where it's headed while it's happening.
Then at the end of the day I ask myself one thing, and I try not to make a whole ceremony out of it because then I won't do it. Did today flow toward that, or did it just move? Most days for me the honest answer is it just moved. That's not me beating myself up, that's just the read.
So the question I've been sitting with lately, and I don't have it worked all the way out, is what's already cut underneath me that I haven't looked at. Not what should I go pick, I mean what's already there. In my body. In the way the money moves through the month. In how I talk to my kids on a regular Tuesday when nothing's going on. There's a groove under all of that whether I've looked at it or not, and there's one under yours too.
Anyway. That's kind of where I'm at with it right now.