Heatbreak

When people say their hearts are broken, you usually think of a relationship ending, a break-up of the romantic kind. I never had to break up with anyone or be broken up with but I have lost a child. And I know that sometimes our hearts break over other things that are just as painful, if not more, than losing a love.
In May I had a ministry heartbreak and I'm still recovering. I'm thinking it's going to take a while. I can't even explain the heartbreak I'm going through because it involves other peoples' private lives, but I can write poetry about it. 

HEARTBREAK

My heart has been broken in small ways

Thousands of times

Cuts and bruises, occasional splinters

Sometimes by knives thrown my direction

Unintentional shrapnel from others’ decisions, and fights

Or sometimes intentional stabs that aim and miss and hit somewhere else

Sometimes it’s more of a stretching, tearing

                 a realization that life can’t stay on this same course

Like seeing those first steps and knowing one day they’ll run

Or the last glimpse as they wave and board the plane

The slow and painful pulling away of a heart that was once glued to yours

 

My heart has been shattered

six times 

In the irrevocable way—healing somehow but different in the end, mangling up into a harder kind of heart

                Scar tissue

pulling in painful positions and remains visible forevermore

The repair happens with time and listening and waiting and care

But the heart that got beaten in the process

                never beats the same, never sees the same

                                And no time can heal that

No truth is big enough to unwind the truth that a person you loved isn’t who you thought they were

That the world is worse than you ever believed

That God sometimes gives us crushing weight and allows damage that only he can fix

                And that sometimes he chooses not to or we choose not to allow him and we live with the occasional punched-gut feeling of remorse

 

Erosion of confidence is a hard, hard end

And then it seems there’s no way forward

Except to grab the only hand that’s there and let it pull you back toward the light

        mending and embracing and waiting for whispers of truth

To pour into those cavities and cracks within the shattered heart

 A glimpse of wisdom that fills the void left where innocence once lived