The Courage to Let Go of Your Own Heart

On December 3, 1967, Louis Washkansky lay on an operating table at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, and did something no human being had ever done. He allowed Dr. Christiaan Barnard to remove his failing heart and replace it with the heart of a young woman who had died in a car accident. The first human heart transplant. No case studies. No long-term survival data. No guarantees.

But here is the detail that stuns me. Before a transplant can succeed, the body's immune system must be suppressed. The very system designed to protect you has to be quieted, because it will attack the new heart as a threat. The thing meant to save your life, your body treats as an enemy.

Washkansky had to trust that what felt like danger was actually deliverance.

Isn't that the shape of courage in the life of faith? God offers us a new heart — Ezekiel 36:26 promises it plainly — but receiving it requires surrendering the old one. And everything in us resists. Our defenses flare up. We cling to what is familiar, even when it is failing us, because at least it is ours.

Courage is not the absence of that resistance. Courage is lying down on the table anyway, opening your chest to the Great Physician, and trusting that what He places inside you will beat stronger and truer than anything you could have kept on your own.