Get over it

I was recently talking with my friend about a tragedy her family experienced and she said I wish I could just get over it. I knew what she meant – she just wanted to stop crying every time she thought about the hurt. She just wanted the tears to stop welling up all the time.

But as I listened to her, I thought of how appropriate her sorrow is. What happened is terrible, heartbreaking. It isn’t the kind of thing you can just “get over”. We aren’t made that way because we are made in the image of God and His sorrow is immense. He wept at Lazarus’ tomb, and in the Garden of Gethsemane, and He still weeps from heaven over the suffering sin’s curse has caused His beloved children. So our heartache reflects some of the sorrow of God.

My grief is beyond healing; my heart is broken. I hurt with the hurt of my people. I am stunned and silent, mute with grief.  Jeremiah 8:18

Maybe you’ve known this kind of pain, a sorrow that clutches your heart and twists it beyond recognition. Beloved, you are not alone. If anything about God can be said to be broken, it is His heart.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “You are the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:27). Our hands are His. Our feet are His. This means His hands are also ours – His nail-scarred hands. His feet are also ours – feet washed by tears and dried by love. If we are to be the body of the Man of Sorrows, we must accept that it comes with wounds. It was broken and poured out for us so that sin could be forgiven. So the curse could be broken. So one day He could wipe every tear from our eyes and eliminate the source of our pain forever (Revelation 21:4).

When our heart aches, we just want it to stop. And so in an effort to keep functioning, we sometimes resolve to harden our heart, resisting the hurt and the sorrow. But a stony heart cannot feel. A stony heart is a dead heart. Functionally that person can be said to be without a heart, heart-less.  It’s far more dangerous to have no heart, than to have a heart that hurts, that is broken.

God loves your broken heart, because the broken heart knows it needs Him. The broken heart is exactly the kind of material He can work with to make something more. Maybe the pieces can be like seeds, can grow into something more than they were. Whole and unbroken, a heart is only one seed. Broken, its potential is multiplied a thousand times over. God makes something better out of the brokenness. The flower is better than the seed. The bread is better than the wheat.

So go ahead and weep, wail and mourn. Let the tears fall. God has given you the privilege of sharing His heart, to give expression to His sorrow over this thing that has left you crushed. Turn to Him with the pieces. What we can be in Him is always something more than we could ever be on our own. But it’s only the broken who are eligible.