Heart Made Whole: What to Do When You’re Broken

From the beginning, I’ve made it a policy to be real here. So for the sake of full disclosure, for the last several days, I’ve been struggling under symptoms related to PTSD. Specifically, I’ve been in fight-or-flight, which has made me by turns panicked and exhausted. In layman’s terms, I’ve been a hot mess. (But I’ve been faking it pretty well. That happens when you have years and years of practice.)

There’s good news —

The reading we have been doing in Christa Black Gifford’s Heart Made Whole has been just what the doctor ordered! (Well, what the Great Physician ordered, anyway.)

Let’s start with a scripture… One of my favorites…

Psalm 18:20 MSG – “God made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before Him.”

I’ll admit that I’m broken. Will anyone else join me?

Christa speaks to that…

“No matter how tattered a heart becomes by the punches of life, Jesus has never encountered an impossible case,” (Gifford, 100.)

Is anybody else encouraged by that? No matter how broken I am, Jesus isn’t scared of it or overwhelmed by it. (That makes one of us! Ha!)

Christa goes on…

“The only way for your heart to live in unity with God is if you’re also living in unity with yourself. This can happen only if you call in a skilled mediator, Jesus, who sits with all the parts of your heart, both wounded and whole, and begins a safe, truthful inner conversation in which everything is brought to the light and laid out on the table,” (Gifford, 112.)

And then, because God wanted to make sure I got this point, when I opened one of the other books I’m currently reading — Ann Voskamp’s The Broken Way, I found this:

“The pieces of me, the shards I didn’t know how to gather together again, the ache that kept me up at night that I didn’t even have words for — none of the pieces of me would find peace — until I could see and feel and experientially enter into the reality of my union with Chris. Peace isn’t a place — it’s a Person. Peace isn’t a place to arrive at, but a Person to abide in. ‘I myself am your peace,’ says Jesus,” (Voskamp, 47.)

So, in other words, I’m a broken-up, shattered, hot mess, but I don’t have to fix it. I can take it all to Him like a little kid with a broken toy. I can dump it into His hands and say, “Can you fix it?”

And He will.

I can do that.

This post is part of a weekly book discussion that I co-facilitate with my brother-buddy, Jason Stasyszen. You can find him at Connecting to Impact. If you haven’t read the book, you can join in the discussion anyway! And if you have written a response to this week’s chapter, you can link it up at the widget below!