What follows is part 2 of Pastor Wrinkle’s latest sermon.

Dick Cheney was once questioned about his physical health by a  white house reporter. His answer to the question was “ Except for the occasional heart attack I never felt better.”

Isn’t that true for all of us? Life is full of occasional heart attacks. No one is exempt. No one gets out of life pain-free. No one: Not the President; Not the Queen of England; Not the storekeeper in his shop; Not the doctor in his operating room; Not even the Pastor in his pulpit. Everyone is subject to the occasional heart attack.  I’m not talking about the physical condition caused by heart disease although that is one form of heart attack. I am talking about those things in life which cause us to wish we had died: It can be the death of a loved one; A long-term illness; A divorce; Or a child hooked on drugs. We all have our own personal heart attacks. Some of them catch us by surprise and knock the wind right out of us and others are of our own making. So it was with our Scriptural passage yesterday. Peter  made a tragic error in choosing sides and it sent his life into a tail spin.

Now I know we would all like to get out of life scott free. We all want heart attack free lives, but we have to face reality; That isn’t going to  happen. This world is a heart attack zone, bad things happen here ever since  Adam and Eve blew our chances at Eden by eating the apple. Bad things are going to continue to happen until Jesus comes back and sets things right. Yet somehow still we think we can try in our own power to fix things.

You may have heard recently that a meteor hit Siberia. This meteor it is said struck the ground going forty thousand miles per hour  and injured over 1,000 people as it struck the earth and blew out windows in a city of 1,000,000.

The response of the world is to ask “How can we stop this from happening again?”

I have a simple answer. “We can’t.” Meteors fall and you can’t tell them to stop. Heart attacks happen and you can’t hold them back. It’s part of living in an imperfect world.

Further you can’t stop a heart attack from hurting. By definition they are things that strike at the heart of who you are. You don’t just wave them off like yesterday’s bad chicken. They are more than mere annoyances. They are painful things that you have to work through.

So you can’t stop them and you can’t stop them from hurting

But what you can do is learn to be happy in the heart attack.

“How does that work Pastor J?” You ask.

“We are supposed to be happy about falling meteors, divorces,  loved ones dying and real life heart attacks?”

No we aren’t supposed to be happy about tragedy but we can be joyful in tragedy.

James 1:2 says “² Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.”

When life’s heart attacks come they can be opportunities for great joy if we will just follow God’s path.

More tomorrow….