A Broken Heart

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At my church we sing a song with a lyric that says “break my heart for what breaks yours” and today my heart is broken.

I have often said that as Christians we have a heart for people because God is a god with a heart for people. In my prayers I so often ask God to give me his heart for people, when I read my bible I’m drawn to stories of Kind David because he is described as a man after God’s own heart, I cannot imagine a better way to be described.

It pains me to admit that when I pray for a heart after God’s own most often what I really mean is a vague feeling of love for everyone, the desire to “do good” and “serve people selflessly.” So often I link the feeling of “love” with a feeling of happiness and of joy, but love is so much more than that.

Over the last week God has answered my prayer in a way that I was not necessarily expecting. My heart is heavy, it breaks for a broken a world, a world where bad things happen to people. I don’t say good people, or bad people, or use any sort of adjective because in the end we’re all just people. God’s heart is for everyone, equally, with no qualifier or prerequisite.

We live in a world full of people who experience heart wrenching sorrow, soul crushing grief, and who so often feel desperately alone and unloved. We feel that the weight of the world rests solely on our shoulders and that not only is there no one who could possibly understand what we’re going through, there’s no one who would even want to try.

For my heart to be after God’s own heart I must love, and to love I must begin to try to understand what love truly is. Love is something so selfless that we desire the very best for the ones we love regardless of if it lessens us. God’s command to love one another is not a call to send good vibes to people, it’s a call to action. A call so profound that the only way God could answer it was to send his own Son to die a horrific death for us, so that we could live. And not just live a life scraping by on spiritual food stamps, but to live our lives to the fullest, to be full of the joy that is found in a reconciled relationship with our creator and to begin to take steps towards living up to our greatest potential.

Today my heart is broken.

Not only because I finally share God’s heart for a broken world, but because up until this point I’ve done practically nothing to help mend that brokenness. Even in my most selfless acts of giving I hold something back. I show love by giving the bare minimum to people, I hoard my time and my money. The best of what I have I hold in reserve for myself. God’s act of selfless love was to send his only Son to die for me and I have imitated that by sacrificing only the worst of what I have. My heart is broken because until now I had somehow thought that I was doing well in showing love.

Today my heart is broken. I am a broken person in a broken world, loving other broken people. I’m not going to get it right all the time, or most of the time. But I’m going to try, the best that I can. Every day. I love because God loves.

And the healing begins now.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 2, 2013 at 3:59 AM

    Jeff,
    Thank you for modeling an honest Christian life. No one gets it right all the time, but the heart's intention is what God sees. And that's what the youth see, as well. Great blog!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aaron MoraJuly 2, 2013 at 5:05 AM

    Love this! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. breylee {rocksinajar.com}July 3, 2013 at 6:27 AM

    Thanks for sharing this, Jeff. Your honesty and vulnerability in this piece are lovely. I look forward to reading more. :)
    -Aubrey

    ReplyDelete

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