Finding someone with a broken heart or with a story about a broken heart isn’t too difficult. Broken hearts are one of those things we seem to have in common. The who, what, when, where and how of each person’s story is unique and their journeys of healing are equally individual. Here is my story.

 

My heart broke on July 12, 2007. I awoke in the morning to discover that my spouse had passed away in his sleep during the night. His death was unexpected as so many deaths are. I managed to get through the next few weeks and months and years operating in zombie mode. I wasn’t exactly dead but I wasn’t fully alive.

 

The difficulty of a broken heart is that it isn’t always clear to the observer when someone has a broken heart. I hid my true feelings by faking it and pretending that everything was ok. It wasn’t. 

 

The pain and suffering of my broken heart led me to develop some misguided thinking. In my brokenness, I wrongly came to believe that I had somehow failed to do enough to keep my spouse from dying and therefore judged myself unworthy of life and love. I isolated myself from others and developed habits that were unhealthy and destructive. These actions only served to inflict more damage on my already wounded heart.

 

One day in my isolation, I began reading the New Testament. At first it wasn’t easy. Somehow, I persisted and continued reading. While I read, my heart listened to the healing words of Jesus. I heard how he cared about people and how he loved them and healed some of them. I heard him talk about a better way of living. Especially in the writings of John, I heard God, through Jesus and the comforting Holy Spirit, asking me to let them love me. My healing didn’t come all at once but gradually my broken heart began to mend.