Heart Attacks: Healing Life's Soul-Piercing Pain

By John Butler

In the battle for our souls, pain is the secret weapon. From full-scale frontal assaults to back-stabbing sneak attacks, pain is part of the human existence. It attacks our hearts in ways we may not notice until we find ourselves in real trouble. But Jesus was way ahead of us, providing hope and help for the soul-piercing pain of living. In this book, you’ll see the symptoms that indicate your soul has been attacked, and find the path to health and healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664263772

John Butler

John Butler has written and directed award-winning shorts for the Irish Film Board and directed and co-wrote the 6-part TV sketch show Your Bad Self. He is an occasional columnist and interviewer for the Irish Times and his writing has appeared in the Dublin Review, the San Francisco Chronicle and on NPR. John lives in London.

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Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-6378-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6376-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6377-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022908263

WestBow Press rev. date: 05/09/2022

Contents

Preface

1      It’s Universal

2      Symptoms

3      The Numbing Down of the Church

4      Hope and Help For The Hurting Heart

5      The Process of Healing

6      Guarding Your Heart

7      Of Hearts, Health, and Holidays

8      Overcoming Church Hurt

9      The Soul of a Hero

10    The Cycle of Healing

Preface

Can I pray for you? It was a question with only one right answer. I was twenty-seven years old and had just left my first church—the church where I had accepted the call to pastoral ministry. It had not ended well. Now I was standing in a church that I had intentionally chosen to visit because it was large enough in which to hide. They didn’t need me and I had no intention of serving in ministry any time soon, maybe not ever again. It was 1997.

I dutifully followed her down to the altar, partly because I knew I needed prayer, but mostly because my people-pleasing personality and Southern upbringing rendered me too polite to tell her no. By the time we got to the altar, we were not alone. This was not just going to be a sweet little prayer between Ms. Connie, my wife, and me. She had called for reinforcements. So as the eight or ten of us gathered in the altar, Ms. Connie didn’t bow her head to pray, she locked her eyes onto mine. I knew I was in trouble. She said, You have arrows in your back that are causing you great pain, but you are walking around like nothing’s wrong. The Lord wants to heal you of that pain today.

I’d like to tell you that I had a glorious experience with the Lord that day, but the reality was something less dramatic. I was respectful and submissive, if not completely convinced of the revelation she had offered. It was my first encounter with this idea of woundedness, of pain in my soul caused by events in my life, and I was the worst kind of stubborn person—a religious one.

Looking back, I wish I had known then what I know now. Unfortunately, I had more pain to experience, more lessons to learn, without a practical, biblical filter through which to see and understand them.

The next year, I startled myself when I realized the strange sound I had just heard was actually my own voice. I was alone in my van after having spent the better part of the day wading through the devastation of my father’s unexpected announcement that he was divorcing my mother after forty-three years of marriage. For hours, I had done my best to console my mother, counsel my father, and communicate semi-coherently with my brother and sisters. Now, alone with my thoughts and feelings for the first time since I had heard the news, I literally turned my head to see what had made that noise. It was an unrecognizable cry from a previously untapped depth of pain in my soul. It was the sound of my own heart breaking.

Less than a year later, as a public school teacher at the time, the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado was a gut punch for which I was unprepared. I sat in my truck weeping as I heard the reports, trying to pull myself together before I went inside my house to my wife and two small kids. It forever changed my perception of what was possible in our world. Walking into my sixth grade classroom the next day, I was a different person.

Then came 9/11, the ever-increasing challenges of parenthood and the second decade of marriage, the pressures of a growing church and greater career responsibilities. The deaths, the losses, the stress—all the things that come with adulthood in this broken world—began to accumulate.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that those things have an effect on a person that is not optional. I had spent my whole life just trying to shove that pain as far down as possible. Time heals everything, right? Ignore it long enough and it will just go away, right? I’ve since learned that time is neither a healer nor a magician. Ignoring something does not make it magically disappear. As a matter of fact, given enough time and inattention, it not only doesn’t go away, its effects grow in a way rivaled only by infectious diseases.

Over time, I’ve come to call them heart attacks. They are a series of well-planned, well-executed, coordinated attacks on the center of our spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being. Over the course of a lifetime, our hearts undergo a barrage of highly individualized attacks, from the barely perceptible to the life-altering and unforgettable. The cumulative effect is devastating.

If you consider that biblically, the inner self —your soul and spirit—is often referred to as the heart, then you have to recognize that any attack on your heart comes from the avowed enemy of everyone created in the image of God. That enemy is described in Genesis as subtle, and it is that subtlety that makes these heart attacks so dangerous.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but all of those painful events in my life were affecting my thoughts, my feelings, and my decisions. That is the exclusive domain of the soul—the mind, the will, and the emotions. Thus, anything that causes a negative change in how I feel, how I think, or what I do is an attack against my heart. A heart attack. If left untreated in a person’s physical body, a heart attack can be fatal. My mother had heart trouble all my life. I am painfully aware of the impact of heart health on a person’s vitality.

But what do you do if your heart attack is not physical? What can you do about heart attacks of your soul? And how do you even know it’s happening? That’s the purpose of this book. I want to break down this issue in a way that is not only biblically sound, but also informed by real-life experiences. The goal is that as you read it, you will begin your own journey of healing so that you can live a healthy life from the inside out, free from any long-lasting effects of your heart attacks.

1

It’s Universal

Guard your heart above all else, for it

determines the course of your life.

—Proverbs 4:23 (NLT)

When the wisest person who ever lived, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says that you should do one thing above all other things, it seems to me that you should pay attention. Solomon says to guard your heart, which is your inner self. Why? What makes this one thing so important? Because your heart determines the course of your life. It has affected every job you’ve ever had, everything you’ve ever done, every word you’ve ever spoken, every decision you’ve ever made, and every relationship you’ve ever had, including your relationship with God. Given that it determines the course of your life, it would be hard to over-estimate the importance of guarding its health.

I have spent decades decidedly not guarding my heart. I didn’t know I was supposed to, and it doesn’t come naturally for most of us. At various stages of my life, if you could have looked at me with spiritual eyes, you’d have seen me blindfolded, wearing noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, thick mittens covering my hands, and heavily insulated coveralls and boots shielding the rest of my body. My mind struggled to make sense of it all.