I Heal Hearts but Forgot My Own

I want to tell you about that recording.

I put the stethoscope on my own chest in a call room at two in the morning in Oklahoma City, and I listened to my own heart through the desk speaker the way I would listen to a patient's, with attention, with care, with the specific quality of clinical presence I had been giving to every person but myself.

Forty years of faithfulness I had never stopped to receive.

That is not a small thing to realize. It is not comfortable to know that the instrument you have been protecting so vigilantly in others has been left to fend for itself. But it is necessary to know.

Your heart is not a metaphor. It is doing its work right now, without applause, without being asked. You are allowed to attend to it. You are, in fact, the one person uniquely positioned to do so.

— Job