brokenness

I have come to realize that when we have a broken heart, we can do one of two things - let it scab over and harden, or embrace our tender woundedness.  Our gut reaction and the way the world often encourages us to respond is the former.  It is easier.  Toughen up, chin up, move on.  But I think God calls us to the latter.  "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26). It is our tender, broken wounds that God can use, not our hardened hearts.

I have experienced grief, to a greater or lesser extent, many times in life - grief over saying good-byes to friends or places with each military move.  Grief of missing family and holidays across the miles.  Everyone experiences some dose of these griefs throughout their life.  And I honestly dreaded feeling these sadnesses every time they hit me.  Who wants to embrace pain or sadness?  But I realize now that the pain of my grief works to bring about change in my life because it is that pain that forces me to adjust to my new reality.  And it is also through pain that I heal.  We don't heal by ignoring, denying, avoiding, or hardening.  We heal by feeling.

When we do not allow acknowledge our grief, our sadness, our brokenness, we deny God the chance to bless us through it.  If I cut off my pain or stuff it down deep and not deal with it, feel it, I also in essence cut out my capacity to feel joy.  A hardened heart does not feel pain, but it also does not feel joy.  I think feeling grief truly makes it more possible to feel other emotions such as love, joy, and excitement.  In this broken and hurting world, our loving and gracious God has figured out a way to take our brokenness, our hurts, our deepest pains, and use them to shower us with the deepest joys.  A tender and open heart, busted wide open, can feel SO much.  If we let it.

If you google "grief" (I did in those first horrific weeks), you read it is a process (which implies a beginning, a middle, and an end) or about the five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  But being in such an all-consuming depth of grief, that "process" was not comforting to me in any way at all because I did not see the "end."  If the "end" of that process even existed, it was so far out and removed from me that it provided absolutely no hope or comfort.  That can be a scary place to be.

But I think it is when I allowed myself to start to embrace grief as an ongoing thing, a process without end, an agent of change, a method of blessing, that I began to see hope.  My relationship with Ryan continues internally, it always will, until I see him again.  I don't stuff that relationship down or forget it or harden myself against it - I take him with me.  I let my heart stay wide open and tender and raw and usable.  Grief is the price of love and its pain can be transformative, if we allow God full access to use every part of it.  "My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise." (Ps. 51:16)  Grief is a gift - we just need to learn how to accept it.