Last night I was doing Day One of Week 5, entitled Binding Up the Brokenhearted: Straight to the Heart.
In the first paragraph she says that if she asked us to remember our heartbreaks, we would likely remember every detail. I'm already feeling threatened. "Ok, Beth, don't go there. Just stay away from that topic. Please don't make me remember and reflect on anything today. Can we discuss something else? Maybe skip to Day Two?"
And mercy. What does she do? She asks us to remember our worst heartbreaks. Oh how horribly easy it is. Pain is life-changing. I know full well that pain can be terribly personalized. The type of personality or disposition you have so heavily affects what hurts you and how much you feel it. I know my own sensitivity, and I know the depth of pain that I have felt in 21 short years. There are some things that I know I will never be able to capture with words. Emotion and thought so intense, so severe, that I consider those moments to have been only me and God. No one else could know. Only Him. Sometimes I wish I could communicate those moments to others, but I treasure those moments because it fuels my faith that He is a personal God and can be where no one else can.
Speaking of those moments, Beth says "A heart is almost always broken in a specific moment over a single action." I wept last night as my heart screamed a resounding "yes." I remembered those moments readily.
Watching your family cry over a casket, some of them unable to stand. Collapsing inside as we suffered a loss too young to imagine.
Getting an early morning text message that says "Chanel, she's gone." Then being picked up off the floor because you cannot bear the weight of your heavy heart.
Sitting on your bed weeping and praying with literal open hands as you hand over a relationship that you don't know how to live without.
Hearing the words "I just don't think it's gonna work out" and realizing that you've been lied to, and you believed every word. Sobbing until you finally get a few hours of drug-induced sleep. Only to wake up and whimper "Oh God, no. Just put me to sleep. Please make me sleep."
I remember these moments and feel the literal punch to my heart. And all over again I feel my soul leaning into God with such intensity that I feel I might suffocate. Can you relate? Have you met a brokenness that makes your heart scream? Do you know that dark night without sleep filled with cries that leave you breathless?
Oh but praise God- we do not forever inhabit this night.
Isaiah 61:1 says "He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted."
Praise God this is one of His purposes. But look deeper. The word used for "bind up" is "chavash." It means "to compress, to stop." God did not just send His Son to soothe an aching heart. He sent Him to stop the bleeding of the hemorrhaging heart. We have been so wounded. And He presses His scarred hands into our marred and bleeding hearts. He compresses the wound to stop the bleeding. Oh what a Healer. what a Healer. Have you noticed that brokenness seems to intensify before it gets better? He puts pressure on our wound, but eventually- the bleeding stops. Oh the times He has pressed His hand into my weak and bleeding heart. He was there. He healed me. He came to heal me.
In Jeremiah 18, God tells the Israelites that He wants to make them into a beautiful vessel even though they are like marred clay. But He is the excellent potter. They have been broken, often by their own decisions, but He wants to remake them. But how do they respond to the invitation? They tell God "It's no use." Do not choose the same response. No pain, no mistake is too much for this Healer. Stand up. Rejoice. He came to heal. He came to chavash.
Father, you are beautiful in our pain. You are good in our pain.
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