Some things hurt so deeply that you feel as though someone broke into your chest and gulped your heart and wedged it into a milk jug. You have people in your life that will never understand that pain, the reasons why it runs so deep, and they may even cast judgment on you because you deal with it in ways that they deem unfit. And when you are standing on your figurative porch, holding your milk jug heart in the cold, cold sun...you can either hold it in a jug and know they are wrong; or, you can realize maybe God allowed it to be removed because he wants your heart in your hands for awhile. Better yet, perhaps he wants your heart in his hands...
God has taught me the most gripping love in my times of pain and adversity. Hear me- he does not want pain for our lives; but he will use it. I have had the honor, very recently, to have been fairly wounded by one very close to me. (You cannot be wounded by those you do not love or those that do not love you. This is the blessing of betrayal.) These wounds meant levels of emotional betrayal in dark hours taking on a new meaning. I gained a new awareness of losing trust, and a sense of injustice in the entire situation left me reeling.
Our hearts are literally protected beneath our rib cage. I have heard many a wounded person talk about "protecting their heart." I have faced the temptation of protecting and guarding my heart in the wrong way by actually deciding I would keep it to myself, never to be free again. Protection and Prison are both a cage in their own right, but they are not the same thing.
We do become the same shape as the prison that holds us. If pain is our prison, we are allowing ourselves to a life with no joy. If anger is our prison, we are allowing ourselves to a life with no mercy. This list could be long; but, the bottom line is that we easily blame others or God (or our idea of him) for our prisons when we chose them for ourselves. If our prison is our rib cage- then no one gets in; but, we won't get out, either. If my heart remains in my chest, I have wasted the ability and God given gift to feel. I have wasted the honor to live and be hurt, and be healed, and be loved, and be a survivor of loving.
If I keep my heart in my hands, I can too easily drop it, or make it in to a paper Valentine and send it off on a paper raft into a paper ocean.
But if I am willing to let my heart be pulpy in my life circumstance and ripped out, and then take it in my milk jug, and intentionally give it to a friend that can help carry the weight, He will make the burden light. If I take my suffering heart to someone who knows suffering, too, He will fill it with a passion for caring for orphans and widows, knowing that the best thing you can do to feel better is to help others. In the hands of a skilled surgeon, He will stitch the hole in my heart that my betrayers gashed (and he will lovingly leave the scar to remind me that He stitched the wound). He will pick my heart up off of the sandy ground and make one grain in to a pearl. He will take the empty page and make it in to a new song. He will meet my heart, at the heat of the day, at the well...and will ask for the empty milk jug so he can fill it, instead, with Living Water.
This is what Jesus does with milk jug hearts...but only if we chose to hand our hearts over...
So? What's your prison and what or Who will set you free?
