At some point, everything in your life from your dishwasher to your phone breaks. This includes your heart, which can also be broken.
Who or what has broken your heart?
The face of a person, especially the eyes, are like a window into their heart. Proverbs 15:13 [ESV] says, “A glad heart makes a cheerful face, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is crushed.” We all know the difference between the appearances of these two hearts. A cheerful heart and a crushed heart are revealed in differing faces.
How’s your heart today? Cheerful? Crushed? Something else.
Importantly, when something is going wrong in your life and breaks your heart, your energy is depleted leaving you as a shell of yourself. Proverbs 17:22 [NLT] says, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.”
There’s a difference between a bad person and a broken person. Sometimes, they both do things that are basically the same, but for different reasons. The person who is bad needs to literally break their hard heart by giving it to God. The person who is broken has seen life break their heart and they need to bring it to God for healing. If we don’t understand this difference, we can bless a bad person, and burden a broken person.
At various points along the journey, life will break your heart, and the heart of a person you are walking the path with. When this happens, the likelihood of bad decisions increases. When this happens, it’s good to think about your heart like you do your body. If your body suffers trauma that injures it, your body is then reset and sent through a rehabilitation process. If your heart suffers trauma that injures it, your heart also needs to be set by God with the help of wise counsel and given a rehabilitation process to heal up. If you do not do this when pain comes but just keep pushing forward, at some point you will break yourself badly. This means saying no to some things for a while so you can say yes to healing.
What is broken in your life and has broken your heart? How have you responded, and what changes might need to be made?