The Miracle of a Beating Heart: A Faith Awakening in India

Between 2002 and 2007, I made fifteen trips to India for New York Life.

Those trips were necessary because of a partnership we had established with MaxIndia, a highly respected health-care company that owned clinics and hospitals throughout the country.

Initially, I had concerns about traveling so frequently to such a distant land with such a different regulatory, legal, and cultural environment. I had heard stories about infrastructure problems, poor water quality, and extensive poverty.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that much of what I had heard was true.

But there was another India as well.

Its economy was booming. The financial services industry was thriving. New York Life’s growth in life insurance sales in India was astounding. In the first five or six years of operation, we more than doubled new sales each year, and our staff grew from a handful of people to more than 10,000 agents and employees.

It became one of our greatest global success stories, and I was pleased to be an important part of it.

I also grew to love India and its ambitious, industrious people.

Yet I never fully adjusted to the highly visible poverty in both urban and rural areas. Even in the more affluent sections of major cities, I was rarely more than a few minutes from people living in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

I was pleased that New York Life felt a social obligation to contribute to charitable causes throughout the country. On many visits I had the privilege of presenting checks to adoption agencies and other worthy organizations.

I prayed frequently for the people of India and eventually looked forward to each trip, increasingly realizing that my business responsibilities could also provide opportunities to live out my Christian faith.

After one of our board meetings, MaxIndia Chairman Analjit Singh invited me to visit a new and technologically advanced cardiac hospital in New Delhi.

As we entered the attractive, modern atrium, Analjit asked whether I would like to observe a surgical procedure.

Initially I hesitated.

I wasn't sure how I might react to the sight of blood during open-heart surgery.

But I assumed I would be observing from a surgical amphitheater ten or twelve feet above the operating table. If I became uncomfortable, I could simply step backward or look away.

Besides, how many people ever get the opportunity to watch an open-heart surgery?

So I agreed.

After touring the facility and meeting the chief of staff and a prominent surgeon, I was taken to a pre-surgery scrub room.

Then something happened that quickly destroyed my amphitheater theory.

Along with doctors preparing for surgery, I was instructed to remove my clothing, scrub my hands and arms, and put on a surgical gown, mask, hat, and booties.

These were certainly not precautions required of someone sitting comfortably in an observation gallery.

My heart raced.

After dressing, I was escorted into an operating room where a quadruple bypass was already underway.

Then came the real shock.

The hospital official accompanying me asked the anesthesiologist standing at the head of the operating table to move aside.

I was instructed to stand in her place.

I walked forward nervously.

My stomach was no more than two inches from the top of the patient's head.

I clasped my hands tightly behind my back, terrified that I might accidentally touch the patient or one of the monitoring devices.

To my right were the chief surgeon and an assistant.

To my left stood the chief surgical nurse and another nurse.

Behind me, the anesthesiologist watched the monitors.

Everyone continued working methodically.

No one seemed particularly interested in the businessman from America who suddenly had been inserted into their operating room.

After getting my bearings, I finally looked downward.

There, directly in front of me, no more than eighteen inches from my face, was the patient’s exposed heart.

It was beating.

Regularly.

Methodically.

Continuously.

The surgeons were finishing their work, sewing the final sutures while that human heart continued doing what it had been doing every second of every minute of every hour of every day for decades.

I stared in amazement.

Initially my thoughts were about medicine.

What a marvel of medical science that such surgery was possible.

Who was the first surgeon courageous enough to open the human chest and operate on the heart? How many discoveries, failures, innovations, and years of training had been required to make this possible?

But then something changed within me.

My reaction became profoundly spiritual.

Standing beside that operating table, I suddenly realized that I was not nearly as amazed by the surgeons or the technological advancement of medicine as I was by what was beating before me.

God’s creation.

That heart beat continuously for the twenty or thirty minutes I stood there without missing a beat.

Think about that.

A human heart may beat more than 100,000 times every day.

It never takes a weekend off.

It doesn't stop when we sleep.

It begins beating before we are even born and, absent disease or injury, continues year after year, decade after decade.

What makes that happen?

What is the underlying source of life?

Standing there in New Delhi, looking directly into the chest cavity of another human being, those were no longer abstract questions.

I began to weep.

This was not about technology anymore.

For me, this was about creation.

God’s creation.

And today I would say even more clearly that it caused me to think about the Creator I had come to know personally through Jesus Christ.

Christian faith does not ask me merely to believe in some vague creative force or distant intelligence.

I believe that the God responsible for life is the God who entered His creation as Jesus Christ.

The Creator was not distant.

He had made Himself known.

And standing beside that operating table, I felt overwhelmingly close to Him.

How can anyone deny a Creator, I wondered?

There before me was only one organ in a fantastically complex human body—an organ working in concert with the brain, lungs, nervous system, blood vessels, kidneys, liver, and countless other systems.

And I was looking at only one person.

Around us was an entire planet overflowing with living things.

At that moment, none of it seemed ordinary.

It seemed miraculous.

There have been several moments in my life when I very palpably felt the presence of God.

This was one of them.

During such moments I often cry with joy, and this occasion was no exception. I tried desperately to restrain the tears because I was afraid they might run down my cheeks and actually drip onto the patient’s head.

Fortunately, my surgical mask absorbed what I could not suppress.

I stood there looking at the beating heart and felt as though God had opened my eyes.

How many hearts had I heard beating during my lifetime without thinking about the miracle involved?

Even my own heart was beating rapidly beneath my surgical gown while I stared at another.

Mine had been faithfully performing that same task since before I took my first breath.

I had done nothing to create it.

I did virtually nothing consciously to sustain it.

Yet moment after moment, year after year, it continued.

I had traveled halfway around the world for a business meeting.

I had expected a hospital tour.

I had agreed to observe an interesting medical procedure.

Instead I had entered an operating room and encountered Jesus Christ in a way I never expected.

Not visibly.

Not audibly.

But through the astonishing handiwork of creation.

That is why I now regard the experience as miraculous.

The miracle was not that a surgeon performed a bypass operation. Such operations happen every day.

The miracle was that I was placed inches from a beating human heart at precisely a point in my life when God could use that experience to open my spiritual eyes to something I had seen, heard, and lived with every day but had largely taken for granted.

Life itself.

I entered that operating room impressed by medical science.

I left overwhelmed by the Creator.

God opened my eyes and renewed my faith through a human heart that day in New Delhi.

And as my Christian faith has deepened since then, my conclusion has become more personal.

The God whose creation overwhelmed me in that operating room is the God I know through Jesus Christ.

The heart I watched will eventually stop beating, as every human heart will.

But Christ has given me confidence that physical death is not the end.

The Creator of life is also the Lord of eternal life.

That realization made an already unforgettable experience even more consequential.

I had gone to India to conduct business.

Jesus had something else to show me.

For Reflection

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—
his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made, so that men are
without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither
glorified Him as God, nor gave thanks to Him, but their
thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Romans 1:20-22

On that memorable visit to India, the wonder of God’s marvelous creation was revealed to me in a way that profoundly impacted my faith.

It occurred in a setting I never could have imagined myself in; a sophisticated cardiac facility that I never would have believed existed amid the poverty and deprivation around me.

In my many years on this planet, how often I have missed the opportunity to marvel at the wonder of God’s creation in the cosmos, in plants, in animals and in human creation. What a shame that I have toiled through my daily life without reflecting on or even recognizing God’s creation and the intricacies and beauty of my existence and the things i am privileged to experience through my five senses.

Every person reading these words has multiple opportunities daily to briefly stop what they’re doing a catch a glimpse of God and His creation.

What in nature, within your eyesight right now, exists anywhere else in the known universe?

 Do you believe it all came about by chance?

Do you not marvel at at the wonder of what God has made?

Can you relate to Paul’s admonition to the Romans that foolish hearts can be darkened to the realities of God’s existence and divine creation?

I certainly can! Paul says we have no excuse to miss it, but so many of us do!

I have known several people who have recovered from life-threatening accidents or illnesses who are eager to share how they now live life and perceive their surroundings differently. They now more fully appreciate and acknowledge God’s creation.

Don’t wait for a near death experience to receive that joy and share it with others.

Paul in his letter to the Romans, warns about the foolishness of those who don’t recognize the undeniable existence of God as revealed in creation.