A Heart on the Wrong Side

“And he saith unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while. For there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.” — Mark 6:31 (ASV)

The Sialkot convention of 1910 was Hyde's last. His friends said “the long sleepless nights and weary days of watching with prayer” were “written on every feature of his face.” Afterwards he went to Calcutta to lead meetings and stayed with a friend. He had a fever the whole time but led every meeting. At night the friend, lying awake across the passage, watched Hyde's light come on at twelve, at two, at four and at five.

The friend persuaded him to see a doctor. As the friend remembered it, the doctor said:

“The heart is in an awful condition. I have never come across such a bad case as this. It has been shifted out of its natural position on the left side to a place over on the right side. Through stress and strain it is in such a bad condition that it will require months and months of strictly quiet life to bring it back again to anything like its normal state. What have you been doing with yourself?”

Hyde said nothing. He only smiled. His friend was sure he knew the cause: years of praying day and night.

This is where the famous claim comes from, that prayer physically moved Hyde's heart across his chest. Be careful with it. What we have is a friend's memory, written down years later, of one doctor's remark. We don't know the doctor's name or have his notes, and the doctor himself didn't claim to know the cause; he asked. A heart on the right side has known medical explanations: some people are born that way, and disease in the chest can push a heart over. Within eighteen months Hyde died of a malignant tumour, and he had suffered bad headaches for years. Nobody can diagnose him a century later. The honest course is to tell the story as his friends told it and leave the miracle unclaimed.

That doesn't mean his way of life did him no harm. It almost certainly did. Years of little sleep, missed meals and long vigils while feverish wear a body down. One missionary said Hyde had laid down his life “calmly and deliberately for the Church of God in India.” But Hyde's colleague also recorded that some criticised the way he “seemed to deny to the flesh even its just claims.” Those last words matter: just claims. Your body's needs are real. The teenage helper who cried because his master wouldn't eat or sleep wasn't less spiritual than Hyde. He was seeing clearly.

When the apostles were too busy even to eat, Jesus didn't tell them to pray harder. He told them to come away and rest. When the prophet Elijah collapsed in despair, an angel told him, “Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for thee.” Hyde's friends urged people to follow his spirit of prayer, “but not necessarily in the 'form' that he manifested it.”

Hyde didn't take the months of quiet the doctor ordered. In March 1911 he left India for the last time, as an early biographer put it, a “dying man.”

Some of us are more at risk of giving God too little. Some are the other kind: running on no sleep, skipping meals, pushing harder and calling it devotion or discipline. Rest, food and sleep are gifts from God, not signs of weakness. If you aren't eating or sleeping properly, or you feel you have to punish your body to be good enough, please tell a safe person: a parent, pastor, teacher, doctor, or a crisis line where you live.

One thing to do this week: protect your sleep. Choose a time to put your phone away each night and keep to it for seven days. When you lie down, thank God for sleep as his gift.