For Wilshire Baptist Church
0.1. That was the tiny gap on a Wednesday morning at Wilshire between being allowed to donate blood and being sent home with a “thanks, but no thanks.”
When you donate blood there is a pre-screening process to make sure you are healthy and thus eligible. That includes answering 54 questions about medical history and lifestyle, and getting pulse, temperature and blood pressure checked. The last step is a hemoglobin test, which is a simple finger prick and a drop of blood squeezed onto a slide and put into a scanner.
Hemoglobin is the part of red blood cells that carry oxygen and remove carbon dioxide, and iron is needed to form hemoglobin. Carter BloodCare requires male blood donors to have a hemoglobin level of at least 13.0; my count was 12.9. Dang! I’d “ironed up” my diet in the days before the donation and cut back on coffee, which can deplete iron, and yet I still was low. Fortunately, they let me do the finger prick on my other hand and the reading was 13.1. I was good to go!
I’m glad I have two hands, as well as two arms, two legs, two feet, two ears, two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys. Our built-in redundancy adds strength and provides backup systems when something goes wrong. By contrast, we have just one heart and one brain and so those organs get a lot of extra attention and care.
But even with just one heart and brain, we still can be “of two hearts” or “of two minds” on some things, as the saying goes. And sometimes the gap can be as narrow as 0.1 but it can get us in a lot of trouble. It can lead to duplicity, as when we’re gracious and generous to one person or group and closed and judgmental to another; liberal on some issues and conservative on others. Sometimes we face decisions that have pros and cons for two different directions. “On the one hand . . . but on the other hand,” is often how we describe it. And sometimes we’re totally blind to our dual nature and fall into hypocrisy: “That’s fine for me but not for you.”
Each of us is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as it says in Psalm 139. We know God made us this way, and we can sing praises as the psalmist did, but we’re also complicated and full of contradictions, and that has me tapping the brakes a little bit on the excitement of being who I am. It takes a lot of work to balance and control my diverging emotions, opinions, hungers and attitudes. Sometimes I fail and let the wrong side of my duplicitous head or heart take control.
And yet, the psalmist also says, “Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.” That gives me some comfort that, while on the one hand, I’m a mess, on the other hand, the God who made me also knows what he’s dealing with and can handle that better than I can.