To A Broken Heart:
Your face is the broken surface of every hurting heart I have ever glimpsed. You might be one of my sisters, a member of my youth group, or a very close and dear friend. You might be all three. You might barely be an acquaintance. Yet I love you with all the love of Christ I have to give. It doesn’t seem like very much in this press of pain.
You are aching—cracking—crumbling before me. I know I ought to say something, something to soothe the hurt and mend the gaping wound. In the onslaught of your pain, the pain in my own life rushes around me. “I’m hurting too!” the words wait behind my lips, ready to leap out into your needful ears. “I know how you feel!” I hesitate, realizing that I don’t know how you feel. I know what it is to hurt, and I could selfishly distract you by diverting your attention to the hurt in my life.
I don’t know your hurt.
Pain is pooling in the place where the heart hears, threatening to spill out like the glass over your eyes threatens to shatter drop-like down your face. I take the words and fling them back into my mind so that you’ll never hear them. Maybe you wouldn’t have heard anyway.
The glass over your eyes breaks and you weep. You’re crying— oh, God! It hurts! —and the aching freshness of tears spilling onto your face clamps something around my throat. I’ve never seen you like this before, never knew you could be so broken, yet somehow the brokenness is the same I’ve seen a thousand times before in a thousand other faces.
The ancient newness of your grief combines into one weight with the strength of a thousand griefs, pinning my heart to the back of my chest. I want to rip it out and show you how broken this frail heart of mine is, but the weight of your brokenness holds me back. It tells me that my role here is to be the strong, comforting one, to hold you and help you back to Christ.
Help you back to Christ? I do not know the way myself!
I try anyway, words working like fingers. Yes, words are clumsy fingers, ploughing into the crumbling walls of your sandcastle heart. I fumble to strengthen you, but my words only seem to speed the oncoming wave of destructive despair.
I should be praying with you. I cannot pray. It is as if my tongue is shackled. I think the weight in my heart has reached its chains far. I can only look at you, begging you silently to understand that although I cannot tread this water and hold you up, I’m willing to drown with you. Even my sincerest look is empty, devoid of compassion. More words come, but they are dry chaff. Empty words somehow pulling us down all the more for their lack of substance. Heavy nothings.
I tell you I love you. I want to tell you the truth: I cannot love you. If I loved you, I would be strong enough to push the weight aside and tell you how unloving and broken I find myself, that you are not alone in any of this.
We hug, brokenness meeting brokenness. I tell you I’ll be here for you. We both know I won’t.
I love you. I’m sorry. Another empty-armed hug, both of us embracing our self-confident lies. Embracing nothing.
We prop ourselves up with wobbly assurances on your part that you’ll be okay. Sleep comes. Water washes away the rest of the sandcastle.
I made a comment before, via a different window into your posts, but I liked this one so much and I enjoyed reading it here so much more, that I am compelled to comment again. This is by far may favorite of all of your posts. Full of anguish and love, full of terrible beauty. Wonderful writing.