We halt and holler “anything but this! Anything but this mire, this fire.” Everything within wants to fight as we face the fierce. We plead, “God, you couldn’t have picked a different trial?” We accuse, “You couldn’t have chosen to ‘mess’ up someone else’s world instead?” We beg, “Not this! Anything but this letter of divorce, this death of a loved one, this abuse in marriage, these children left abandoned, this injustice…”
And yet suffering is all around us. We see it perhaps daily, or sometimes many times a day. Why God? Why would you allow such an ugly thing in our lives? Isn’t what we want most days just to live happily in peace and enjoy life? Isn’t it our tendency to long for the easy, the peace, the joy and if we’re really honest… just kinda hope to somehow eventually live happily ever after?
Hearts are broken in ten thousand ways, for this is a heart-breaking world; and Christ is good at healing all manner of heart-breaks. —CHARLES SPURGEON
Hearts are broken and at times we find ourselves in the depths of despair, tears of terror, frightened in fear, stuck with scars in silence, too mortified to move, numb to the nightmare, dumbed in disbelief.
“Someone tell me I’m dreaming, or please for goodness sake—- Wake me up!”
Not THIS, God.
“God, I don’t want a broken heart! I feel like you have taken me, my one whole heart, and crushed it to powder. How can this be good? How can this be refining?”
Psalm 85:12 says, ¨Yea, the Lord shall give that which is good; our land shall yield her increase.¨
I wrote this verse to my fiancé one day, when I felt like the Lord was being particularly good to me. He responded with 6 words I'll never forget. “Ever, only, that which is good.” Think about that with me again for a moment and say it slowly: Ever, only, that which is good. Tears stung in my eyes as I tried to rectify how my painful past could somehow be 'only' good. How can it be, that God only gives us that which He believes is only good? We may not see it as anything remotely close to ‘good’ at the time… but our thoughts, are not His. He sees the full picture, the whole plan which we cannot even fathom.
My mom used to make home-made bread. Wheat must be ground in order to be useful in bread. Have you seen wheat go through a grinder? Ground to powder? If we didn’t know the powder was a useful flour, we might be tempted to think we were ‘destroying the wheat’ in order to find it's most valuable use.
You might feel like God is ‘destroying’ your whole heart. But what if breaking your heart is actually His ever-loving hand remolding and remaking you to be the one precious diamond He desires? What if His dreams are better for you than you can even imagine? What if He really did know what He is doing? Did I just write that? Absolutely… because sometimes, isn’t it a little too easy to forget that He does know and control every detail of our lives?
What if coming to the end of yourself— your crushed broken heart— is really the beginning of knowing and truly experiencing Christ? Many times, we don't know how much we truly need God until we find the pieces of our crushed heart in a heap on the floor.
Ann Voskamp says, “It’s not that your heart isn’t going to break; it’s how you let the brokenness be made into abundance afterward.”
You and I— don’t get to choose or control the hurt that somehow plunges into our lives without warning, but we do get to choose how we respond to the heartbreak.
What if pain can be a gift? A blessing? We wince at the thought. We want to lash out angrily. “Don't you dare tell me God is still in control!”
I know, once upon a time I too, hurt too badly to move. Paralyzed, caught, struck— too scared to do a thing knowing no matter what you do next there will be more hurt? Yes. More pain than I can imagine? Most definitely.
But what does God desire? Why does He allow our hearts to be crushed and broken?
I believe He wants us. You, me, all of us. He wants our trust, He wants our confidence. Even in this fire? Through this trial? But… I don’t LIKE this! No one does, but maybe this brokenness is His way of getting us to take our one broken heart and offer it to Him as a gift, our gift to Him.
