heart health

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in our country today.  It claims almost one million lives annually and there are about 16 million Americans still living who have histories of heart attacks or severe heart pain.  73 million of us have high blood pressure and 6 million of us have strokes each year.  What a marvelous organ the human heart is.  It weighs about one pound, beats about 2.5 billion times over a 70 year span and is strong enough to shoot blood 30 feet from an open blood vessel.  One of the amazing things about the heart, to me, is that every beat of the heart accomplishes two things:   it moves oxygen-rich blood out to feed the body and it also moves oxygen-poor blood to the lungs to be cleaned and restored.  It reminds me of the importance of maintaining our spiritual hearts, as well.  We are called to spiritual heartbeats that continually move the oxygen of God's Spirit to our souls while we are also processing the unclean thoughts, actions and attitudes that compromise the quality of our relationship with God.  And we need to watch what we eat and exercise properly to maintain our physical hearts while we need to watch our spiritual diets and exercise, as well.  We can certainly suffer spiritual heart attacks from clogged relationship arteries.  I suppose it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of good heart health on the physical and spiritual level!   Hebrews 10:21-23 and having a High Priest over the house of God,  let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.  Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.   blessings, Rob Smith