conversations between sisters in Christ
by Aprille I was a teenager when I first heard the analogy of the “construction paper heart”. This analogy, a well-intentioned object lesson, is meant to encourage young people to protect themselves from the dangers of experimental dating. The speaker uses a visual aid, a heart made out of red construction paper: “When you are [...]
God is the Master Designer and He can build out of the most shattered heart something beautiful…
My story isn’t a Hollywood one: I didn’t marry my first love or end up with my best friend. In fact, my story is still being written — but I have the best part already. My ‘happily ever after’ is starting now, right here in the middle of my manuscript. Several years ago I suffered [...]
It takes something extraordinary to let go of what you love and seek no substitutes.
When a fever still rages, we tend to choose the remedy over the redemption. But it’s as healthy as settling for bandages with a bullet in your chest. You don’t just need someone to stop the bleeding; you need a surgeon to get the metal out. You need to stop struggling. You need to scab and scar and heal. You need to let someone else take over and trust them, trust Him, to provide.
Once upon a time in the land of the glass hearts, there lived a young girl. This girl, as all the girls did, carried with her a heart. While she was young it was kept safely on the nightstand by her bed and every night she would look at it and smile. It was so perfect; [...]
Like a clamoring child, we grope and grasp for something like a mirage. We are then left standing in what many of us thought would be an oasis, but which bears only incomprehensible hurt…because we followed a mirage.
We may have awakened love in the wrong season, but God in His mercy does not leave us standing there empty and scarred.
“I think maybe I understand it now,” she whispered.” When it happened, I thought I’d lost everything I cared about. My dreams… my heart…was shattered into too many pieces to count, and I dared not dream again. And the painful days and nights that followed seemed so meaningless and hard then. But now…maybe now I understand a little bit of what it means that all things are beautiful in Your time.”
And here she paused, for though time and God can heal the most broken of hearts, sometimes there will still be little scars left to remind of the wounds that were there — and she was thinking of these little scars now…
“Sometimes our plans must fail so God’s plans for us may succeed.”
I’ve thought of this often over the years, and even with tears in my eyes and aches in my heart I’ve whispered it as I let go of the things I thought mattered most.
I’ve repeated it, knowing that His plans are always the best, and that His time is the only perfect time…
An old journal and a seat among the trees — these were a refuge for a heart that felt broken beyond repair, when the journey seemed too long and too difficult. Into those pages were poured all the pain and loneliness, the wind gently drying the tears that only the blue sky, the tall trees, and God knew fell so often. And yet, in those pages there was also written the records of the work of the Master Physician, the One Who heals heart break.
These words are some of the mileposts, some small windows into that journey in the valley of brokenness. It is my journey, but perhaps it is yours, too…
I had never wanted to know what it was to have a broken heart. I had tried to do things differently from most of the world, to protect myself and my heart from needless pain. But here I was, and it was real.
When I saw that there was someone else that made him smile, the realization that I didn’t light up his world brought the painful truth home. I knew, then, that I could never make him happy the way that I wanted to, the way that it should have been. Knowing that perhaps “he and I, together” wasn’t meant to be after all weighed on my heart like so many heavy bricks, crushing out the spark of joy that once had lit up my world.
