I went to bed last night brokenhearted.

For a whole host of reasons, I can’t give details as to why I’m brokenhearted. It’s a combination of factors, which are primarily out of my hands. It’s grief compounded upon grief, and it’s not because of something I’ve done personally. Rather, it’s an awareness of what sin does.

This morning I awoke just as brokenhearted as I was at bedtime. I turned to God for comfort, direction, and wisdom. And as He’s prone to do – boom! He served up just exactly what I needed. That’s the way He rolls.

It all sprang from a verse in Isaiah – Isaiah 57:15, to be exact. This verse just cried out to be unpacked, and here’s my takeaways.

The question for us today is simple: Is your heart hurting today?

Check this out, from the New Living Translation:

The high and lofty one who lives in eternity, the Holy One, says this: “I live in the high and holy place with those whose spirits are contrite and humble. I restore the crushed spirit of the humble and revive the courage of those with repentant hearts.”

It’s acceptable and encouraged to do the whole “breathe in, breathe out” routine while reading this and evaluating the state of your heart right now. As you wade into this, understand that feeling the presence of God in this very moment is what is called for.

Look. I don’t know of anyone who would willingly choose to experience a broken heart. The jaw-dropping reality, and what all my ponderings today hinge on, is that Jesus willingly suffered and died in our place so that He could reign as high priest in heaven.

He knows just exactly what it’s like to be brokenhearted. He’s been there. Isn’t that something?

The implications are huge.

What this means is that you can cry in His embrace, as a hurtin’ puppy, and know that if you’re brokenhearted He catches every tear.

One handicap we have, though, is that it’s easy and tempting to ignore the pain of a broken heart. You know, just soldier on, eyes fixed ahead, unbowed and determined. That sounds noble, but it’s not really a good idea, especially if you want to be authentic.

See, there’s a healing process when you bring your brokenheartedness to Jesus, and it’s a necessity for spiritual health, growth, and comfort.

Jesus is ready to comfort you, and it’s personally bewildering as to why I don’t lean into Him when I’m hurting.

There is a blessing that comes from pain. I know, right? That’s counterintuitive. Still, it’s that crystalline hurt that pushes us toward God and we experience His love in a way we simply can’t otherwise. It’s a blessing for those of us who are brokenhearted. 

It’s actually kind of crazy, in a good way. If we let ourselves hold back and try to nurse our own wounds, we stifle that supernatural healing and restoration He wants us to experience. We just can’t  let that hurt keep us from drawing close to Him.

He wants us to pour out our pain to Him so that His words can be balm to our souls.

I’m amazed, even after all these years of walking with God, that He sent Jesus to die for me. This is so fundamental, so basic, and yet we in our familiarity skate right past the most profound truth imaginable. 

Our requests to God might include:

• Give me courage to walk through this painful valley. There is a purpose to me being here.
• I want to hear Your voice – a whisper is fine, but if You need to holler to get my attention, that’s fine too.
• Reveal Your heart to me. I thought I could discern it when things were going well, but apparently You’ve had to get out the big guns.
• I believe You’re preparing a good and right path for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s all flat ground and no rocks.
• Don’t let me pull away from You in my grief and suffering. My mouth wants to say “whatever it takes,” but I tend to choke on those words. I’ll need some help with this one.
• Remind me of Your love and compassion. It’s so easy for me to forget those basics.

I don’t know how you visualize God – what your mental image of Him is. It’s different for everyone. It’ll be helpful if you could do that, even right now. Just soak in that sweet space.

Remind yourself that God loves you unconditionally. He’s totally faithful. 

There may be some things in your heart that need to be cleaned out – things that are hampering that blessing that will ease your brokenhearted spirit. Even in times of pain and brokenness you’re still blessed.

God doesn’t want you to deny your pain. If you’re brokenhearted, He wants you to draw near to Him with no holds barred.

Check out Isaiah 57:15 in the English Standard Version:

For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.”

More good stuff: Because God knows all the details of your broken heart, and when you cry He’s right there saving your tears, you are not alone in your brokenness. What a gift that is! He understands your situation completely and is standing by your side through it all.

And here’s a monster truth, to make things even sweeter: There is a gift of hope from Jesus that He can lift your spirit again, just as He rose again after and during the heartbreak of the Cross. Brokenhearted? Claim this.

Let’s do Isaiah 57:15 one more time, this time from the Amplified Bible:

For the high and exalted One, He who inhabits eternity, Whose name is Holy says this, “I dwell on the high and holy place, but also with the contrite and humble in spirit In order to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite [overcome with sorrow for sin].”

That last phrase really captures what it means to be contrite – overcome with sorrow for sin.

This version talks about sorrow over sin. Is that not often the cause of us being brokenhearted? This can be a scary thought.

It may be that the last time you were brokenhearted was simply because of your own personal sin. Through that, God showed you more about Himself through your brokenness. He doesn’t want you to just know facts about Him. He wants to draw you really close, and conviction of sin can absolutely take you to that place of intimacy. 

He doesn’t fail you. He doesn’t leave you or forsake you. But He will absolutely use brokenheartedness to make us right. 

If there’s something about pain you need to know, it’s this: God will take you into a deeper relationship with Him than you can imagine, but it’ll hurt in the process. You’ll be brokenhearted. So instead of running from the pain, you lean into it, take it to God (and don’t try to excuse or sugarcoat it), and every single time He’ll bring depths of beauty out of it.

Jesus endured pain so that we could have a relationship with Him. Do this:

• Ask Him to comfort and heal your heart. Now.
• Ask Him to remove anything you’ve done wrong.
• Ask Him to let you experience His nearness in a fresh way. 
• Ask Him to restore your peace, joy, and hope.

If the pain in your heart throbs again and you find yourself brokenhearted, remind yourself of this simple truth: God is near.

Talk later.

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All change involves an element of loss.

Even good changes.

If you’re single and marry the love of your life, you lose some independence. If you begin a new job, you lose the familiarity of where you once worked. If you move to a new place, you lose the comfort that comes from knowing your way around.

Then there are the bad changes. You lose your health. You lose your job. You lose a loved one.

Change = loss. Ponder that a moment. Change is inevitable in life, and by my simple equation, it follows that loss is inevitable.

We grieve when we lose. I grieve when Auburn loses a ball game, but it’s not a crushing grief (well, sometimes it comes close.) I grieve when we’ve lost a pet. That’s family. In all my years of youth ministry, I’ve grieved when I’ve lost a student … when a kid I’ve invested in and loved on gets spiritually shipwrecked, man, that hurts.

I could go on. Certainly we grieve over lost relationships. There are times when people leave our lives, either benignly or by some incident. There may be times to legitimately say “good riddance” and other times when even after multiple attempts to make things right, they’re just – gone. Heartbreaking.

And loss of a loved one? What pure, unadulterated pain. It could be a grandparent, parent, child, or spouse. If you’re a believer, and you know the one you’ve said goodbye to is also a believer, you understand that your “goodbye” is more accurately a “see you later.” You’ve made arrangements to meet again.

Mama lost her fourth bout with cancer. She began with renal cell carcinoma, a kidney cancer that is rarely life-threatening and relatively easy to treat. (I’ve had that one, and I’m fine.)

Some years later she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Surgery, and she had several cancer-free years. Then, lung cancer v.2. Surgery. Done.

Finally, she found herself complaining of rapidly increasing back pain. This time, it was cancer, and it was everywhere, in her bones. She didn’t last long after that. But she died with dignity, just as she’d lived.

I’m an only child, and we’d already buried Daddy some years earlier. So this was it. I was to be an orphan (albeit a middle-aged one.) We had several good conversations as the day approached and she was lucid. It really wasn’t until a couple of days before her death that she slipped into a quiet, sweet darkness and didn’t communicate. And when she passed, it was expected and I was prepared.

It was still hard. But interestingly enough, I’d done most of my grieving before she actually died. There was time for me to prepare, and my comfort during those days had an awful lot to do with grace. I often wondered in earlier years how I’d react after both my parents were gone, and I think I’ve done fine. Of course there are times when I’d love to visit with them today, but that’s just going to have to stay on hold for a while longer.

So, we have this: Change = loss = grief.

How does one grieve appropriately? More succinctly, how do we grieve as one who has hope?

1. You have to identify your source of hope. This is an immutable, unchanging factor in your life. If your hope is based on how you feel at any given point in time, you are not going to handle loss well. Feelings are the great betrayers. They are ever-changing. They are often based on circumstances. So your hope has to be based not on how you feel, but what (and who) your security is in.

2. You look to those who have hope in that similar source. This is where you look for living testimonies. You know scores of people who’ve dealt with a loss, and I’m not restricting that to the loss of a loved one. It could be some of the other losses I’ve mentioned. And they’ve managed fine. It may have taken a while for them to adjust to their new normal, but often they’ve flourished. (I could riff on “failure” here, but the bottom line is that failure, which is also a loss, can and should lead to a fresh start and eventual success.) Be encouraged by them.

3. Don’t let others drag you down. We all know those people who darken a room by their very presence. They are negative and cynical. You aren’t allowed not to love them, but you are allowed to avoid them, or at least not get trapped in their negativity.

4. Realize your loss can be someone else’s gain. This is a companion thought to that last point. Everything – and I mean everything – happens for at least two reasons. One is to teach you something about yourself and give you inspiration to do something about it if you aren’t happy with what you’ve learned. Second, you can lead and comfort someone going through the same thing you did. It goes from saying “I understand” (which you may or may not) to “I identify,” because you’ve been there. In the ultimate manifestation of empathy, you may be able to honestly say, “I feel (or have felt) what you feel.” Tell me that won’t impact someone else’s life.

5. Accept the fact that you can’t go back. I could say a lot about regrets here, but that’s fodder for another day. What I can say is that you don’t get do-overs. You do get second chances, but that’s not the same. There are moments in our collective past that are forever fixed in time, and they can’t be undone. Sometimes grief grows out of “I should have’s.” Do what you can to internalize this thought: Whatever it was, you can’t take it back. You can learn from it, grow from it, but it won’t change what was, or wasn’t, done. It’s called moving forward.

6. Finally, you can’t place your hope in something that can change. If your total source of hope is found in a person, realize that people change, leave, die. Where’s your hope then? And surely you know better than to place your hope in a paycheck, or modern medicine, or the government. Those can all change, too. From where I sit, that hope is found in a personal relationship with God.

Ancient script says “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”* Change is inevitable, but it should never lead to hopelessness. Hopelessness is not an option. Be encouraged.

*James 1:17