A Broken Heart

Tonight, I'm thinking about a friend of mine who is incredibly hurting.  I wish I could make all the pain go away, and help in some sort of physical fashion, but I can't.  What I can do is pray for you, which I will.  I will pray that God upholds you with His right arm and gives you peace.

I know what it's like to have a broken heart.  Mine has been broken many times.  Love is truly and absolutely blind, but then when we get side-smacked with a bit of reality, the hurt seems to burn like fire.  My "heart" or whatever that place is where we feel emotions, has felt that fire more than one time.  It sears through, taking your breath away and feels like you must be dying.  And you think that dying would be easier than bearing this pain.  And in some ways it would be, I think.  But you're not going to die, not yet, and eventually you'll get up and press on as we all do.  Each heartache, each pain, makes us that much stronger in the end.  Our pain is what helps us have compassion for others.

Being brokenhearted is not romantic nor poetic, although I've written many poems through my brokenness.  Those poems were written in despair and depression and are a precise description of how I felt every time.  Being brokenhearted is being broken - completely.  And not understanding why this has happened.  It breaks a person down to the very core of your being and you are left with a smoldering fire.  But it's still smoldering.  It flickers.  There's still hope when you feel the most hopeless.  Not hope for the thing that broke you.  But hope because tomorrow is a new day, and little by little, that hope grows.  Because the only thing that heals a broken heart is time.

I wrote this many years ago, but this is for you now, my friend:

I can't believe the pain I feel

            and hurt that seers my heart,
                        it seems my breath is almost gone,
                                    my life all torn apart.

You say you understand my grief
            and feel my pain indeed,
                        but you are nowhere near me
                                    when I cry myself to sleep.

There's only One Who truly understands

            my loss of hope;
                        He's ever-present in a crowd
                                    and stays when all have gone.

 He sees my tears and feels my pain

            and wraps His loving arms
                        around my badly shattered heart
                                    to shield me from more harm.

 Jesus is the only One who mends

            what has been torn,
                        by love so great
                                    that's been in place
                                                the moment I was born.