Mending Broken Hearts
The summer of 1971 was a great one for me. It was right before my junior year in high school. I was 16 and could drive and what could possibly be better than that! I remember spending most of the daylight hours during the week that summer painting my Dad’s office building. I would arrive early every morning, plug in my radio and paint the day away. I remember one particular song that was number one on the charts and sure to be played several times during the day—“How Do You Mend a Broken Heart” by the Bee Gees. Now I have always loved the Bee Gees and was greatly saddened by the untimely death of Maurice Gibb recently. But little did I know I would one day do a devotional about their hit song!
It’s a good question. How do you
mend a broken heart? The world if
full of them, that’s for sure. In
education, I saw first hand the results of broken hearts—broken lives, deep
hurt that never seems to heal, painful words and experiences repressed but
very real—often leading to devastation, drug and alcohol abuse and even
attempted suicide. Reality is that
we aren’t very good at mending broken hearts, mostly because it takes risk
and sacrifice to do so and we are so caught up in ourselves we don’t have
time for others.
In Mathew, Jesus talks about the future and the beginning of the end.
He says the “wickedness will cause hearts to turn cold.”
That scares me because it seems that is precisely what is happening to
our world. Sin has broken the
hearts of so many…well, let me ask you this: How can we keep our hearts from
breaking?
One answer is “just don’t have a heart!”
After all, if you don’t have a heart, it can’t break.
Right? I guess we’ve all
been there before. We’ve all
been hurt and responded by saying, “Forget it.
I’m tired of hurting and the pain and the difficulties.
I’m not gonna love anybody, I’m not getting close to anybody again
cause every time I do, I get burned. I’ve
learned my lesson and it’s just not worth it to care!”
Get hurt enough and your heart turns cold and it lets no one in.
Is that’s what happened to the world? Our
hearts have been broken so many times that we just don’t care anymore?
It seems so, but we can be assured that removing our hearts is not the
answer. If we’re not caring, if
we’re not loving, then we’re not living—no heart equates to total
emptiness. After all, it is in our
hearts that Christ resides, and therein lays the answer.
How do you mend a broken heart? Only
Jesus Christ can do that. Its not
how, its who. Christ came into
this world to mend broken hearts—and he’s good at it.
Whether it be an adulteress, a tax collector in a Sycamore tree, an
alcoholic, or a thief. Whether it
be loneliness, suffering, hurt or sorrow
Jesus Christ can mend it. He can
fix it. His love will never fail
us…His love makes all the pain, all the difficulty, all the risk…worth it!
We are His channel to the world to reach those with broken hearts, to reach
those who have stopped caring. You
and I will enter a world tomorrow filled with broken hearts.
Christ is with us. May God
give us the strength and the passion to bring the world the answer to the
question: How can you mend a
broken heart?