When Your Heart Is Broken

After a rough week, my wife was at her wits' end. It had been one of those weeks where one thing after another just seemed to pile up. She was exhausted, emotionally spent, and ready for the week to simply be over.

Then she dropped one of her favorite coffee mugs. Printed on the mug were the words: “Begin each day with a grateful heart.”

It shattered.

Under different circumstances, it would have just been a broken coffee mug. Sweep it up, throw it away, and move on. But this wasn't a different week. This was that week. Watching that mug hit the floor and break into pieces became the tipping point. She was devastated.

Our youngest daughter saw the whole thing happen. She also saw what it did to her mom. So, with that huge heart of hers, she quietly gathered up all the pieces and took them away. We assumed she was throwing them in the trash.

...She wasn't.

Knowing how much the loss of that silly little mug had affected her mom, she grabbed a hot glue gun and got to work. Piece by piece, she tried to put it back together. She found as many of the broken pieces as she could and carefully glued them into place, doing her best to reconstruct the mug.

It wasn't perfect. There were cracks. There were missing pieces. It certainly wasn't going to hold coffee again. But that didn't matter.

She wrapped it in bubble wrap, placed it in a box, and left a handwritten note on top for her mom to find before leaving for work early the next morning.

It was precious.

She couldn't fix the week her mom had experienced. She couldn't take away the exhaustion or undo everything that had happened. But she saw someone she loved hurting, and she moved toward her.

That little act got me thinking about something Scripture says about God.

Sometimes life hurts. Not in some abstract, theological sense. It actually hurts.

There are difficult days. Tough weeks. Sometimes entire seasons when relationships get strained, people disappoint us, plans fall apart, and dreams we were sure would happen simply don't.

Sometimes our hearts get broken.

And when you're in one of those seasons, Christian clichés aren't particularly helpful.

• “Everything happens for a reason.” 
• “Just have faith.” 
• “God's got this.”

There may be truth behind some of those statements, but when someone is hurting, they can land like a Band-Aid on a broken bone.

Scripture gives us something much better. It tells us God is close.

Pain has a way of making God feel very far away. When things are going well, it's easy to talk about His goodness. It's easy to tell someone else to trust Him. It's different when it's your heart that's broken.

David knew something about that.

Psalm 34 comes from a period when David was running for his life. He had fled from Saul and found himself in enemy territory, where he even resorted to pretending to be insane in order to escape. That's the setting behind David's words about God being close to the brokenhearted.

This isn't a greeting-card verse. David had lived it.

And notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say God immediately removes everything causing the pain. He says God is close.

We usually want the situation changed. God, fix this. Restore this. Remove this. Make this stop.

There's nothing wrong with asking Him to do those things. But while we're asking God to change what's happening around us, sometimes His first response is to meet us right where we are.

God Doesn't Ignore the Wound

Psalm 147 gives us another picture:

Psalm 147 celebrates God's restoration of Jerusalem and His care for His people. And I love the way it moves between the enormous and the deeply personal. The very next verse tells us:

The God who knows every star also notices a broken heart. He's not too busy running the universe to notice your wound.

And notice the language: He bandages their wounds. That's the language of tending an injury.

Healing isn't always instantaneous (though sometimes it can be). Some wounds need to be cleaned, protected and given time. Some leave scars. But a scar isn't necessarily evidence that something is still broken. Sometimes it's evidence that something has healed.

You may always remember the betrayal. You may always remember the loss. You may always remember the season when you weren't sure how you were going to make it through.

Healing doesn't require pretending it never happened. But what happened doesn't have to define who you are.

“Come to Me”

Then we hear the words of Jesus:

Pay attention to the invitation. Come to me.

• Not: Figure everything out. 
• Not: Fix yourself first. 
• Not: Get your emotions under control.

Just come.

Jesus isn't offering a technique for dealing with our burdens. He's offering Himself.

We sometimes get Christianity backward. We imagine that our job is to get ourselves cleaned up enough to approach God. Scripture shows us the opposite.

We come because we need Him. Tired. Wounded. Confused. Sometimes without even knowing what we're supposed to say.

We come.

More Than Repair

And here's where that broken mug only takes us so far.

My daughter did everything she could to reconstruct something that had been broken. It was beautiful because of the love behind it. But she couldn't make the mug new.

The cracks were still there. Some pieces were missing. The mug would never again be what it had been before it hit the floor.

After his sin with Bathsheba and his confrontation by Nathan, David prayed:

The Hebrew verb translated “create” is bara—the same verb used in Genesis 1:1:

David isn't asking for a tune-up. He's asking God to do something in him that he cannot do for himself.

David was praying under the Old Covenant, so his words should first be understood in that context. But from our New Covenant perspective, we can see how what David was asking God to do points toward something we now experience much more fully in Christ.

And what David cries out for finds a much fuller expression in the New Covenant.

Paul writes:

New creation. Not merely reconstruction. Not repair.

Christianity isn't God taking the old you, finding all the broken pieces and gluing you back together as closely as possible to what you used to be. In Christ, something genuinely new has happened.

Being a new creation doesn't mean Christians never hurt. It doesn't mean we don't grieve. It doesn't mean people won't wound us or that every painful situation immediately changes.

It means the wound doesn't get the final word about who we are. Neither does the failure. Neither does the rejection. Neither does the betrayal, the loss, the mistake, or the thing someone else did to us.

A Broken Heart Is Not a Broken Identity

That broken mug is sitting in our house today. The cracks are obvious. It will  never hold coffee again.

But strangely enough, it's more valuable to us now than it was before it broke.

Not because it was broken. Because someone loved the person who was hurting enough to gather up the pieces.

Maybe there's something for us in that too.

And when we're the one who's hurting, we need to remember that God has already moved toward us.

God is close to the brokenhearted. He bandages their wounds. Jesus says to the weary and burdened, “Come to me.”

And in Christ, you aren't merely a repaired version of who you used to be.

You are a NEW creation.

So don't confuse what you're going through with who you are.