Healing Our Hearts

Burnley’s beautiful Thompson Park is carefully planned and well maintained. As I walked through it on a summer’s evening, Asian and White families were playing and frolicking on the neat lawns and beside the flowerbeds. Within its grounds is an impressive bronze memorial to Scotsman Dr James Mackenzie, who practised medicine in Burnley between 1878 and 1915, after which he removed to London and gained a knighthood and greater fame. He had worked hard in Burnley to establish hospitals and noted the effects of earlier infection upon the heart’s efficiency in later life. He became one of our first cardiologists and made advances in that ever-so-important field of human medicine.

Ironically, he died of severe angina in 1924, having had his first heart attack in 1901, and various bouts of cardiac pain in those intervening years. It seems strange that one who knew the heart so well, who sought to help others’ coronary and cardiovascular health, should himself succumb to its weakness.

We Christians can diagnose the world’s problems; we know its cause, we understand its outworking and we anticipate its eventual and complete solution. Yet we too inhabit declining bodies; we too are subjected to temptations and trials; we too allow ourselves to feel wearisome on account of life’s battles. Thankfully, we have a great Physician even greater than Sir James Mackenzie who assists us now, and who shall heal us wholly, one day soon.