Photo by jude hill

By Wendy Choy-Chan

When I prayed to God about this blog post, asking Him to give me some words to chew on, I got “hard work and heart work.” I started to write about sermon preparation because I had to preach last Sunday and it was certainly hard work and heart work. But I sensed that God was directing me towards something deeper and more personal. So here we go…

I worked hard in school and in my jobs. Because by working hard, I was doing work on my heart. Let’s just say that there was a space in my heart which was occupied by a scene from a long time ago: We were playing a home game in a basketball tournament. It was half time and we were walking back to the locker room. A teammate caught up with me and uttered underneath her breath, but loud enough for me to hear, “Wendy, you can’t do anything.” And she walked away. This scene, this voice, has been residing in my heart since. I worked hard to use my good grades and achievements to work on my heart, to show that “I am capable of doing something.”

You could probably guess: Hard work does not necessarily lead to heart work. True, I felt better at times, but the underlying condition did not change. Hard work only provided a cover-up bandaid over the wound, but the pain was deeper within. My rock bottom came when one time, a stranger didn’t return a smile to me and the voice popped up, “you can’t do anything!” I knew my regimen of hard work was not working. This was when I turned to heart work. There is a saying in Chinese that the sickness of the heart requires the medicine of the heart (心病還需心藥醫).

What is the medicine of the heart? What does heart work involve? It involves getting to know myself, both the good and the ugly. It involves getting to know God, how much He loves me. It involves resting my heart in Him, and listening to His voice, telling me I am His beloved, I am worth His Son. And slowly, the other voice of “Wendy, you can’t do anything” gets smaller, and surfaces less often. Heart work is presenting myself to the great Physician to let Him work wonders in my heart.

When I prepared for my sermon last week, it was hard work to analyze the passage, to write the script, to come up with illustrations and applications, but the hard work was not done so that I could put another bandaid on my heart. My heart is already being worked on by the love of God. My new heart frees and empowers me to do the hard work of sermon preparation. At the same time, it also reminds me to do the heart work of giving myself and my message back to God, so that He can be the One who will be working on the hearts of those to whom I speak.

Wendy Choy-Chan came to North America from Hong Kong when she was 15.  After graduating with a MScE, she worked as a telecommunications engineer for a few years before becoming a full-time mom.  She earned her MA in Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2016, with an emphasis in biblical studies. Despite living in the coffee capital (Seattle), Wendy enjoys scouting out tea shops with her husband and two daughters.