Hope and Healing for Single Momsნიმუში

RECOGNIZE: WHAT BROKENNESS LOOKS LIKE

Isaiah 42:3 A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.

Mindful Minute

When your heart has been betrayed, broken, or bullied, your feelings are bruised. Your emotions are raw. You feel fragile.

Finding safety can seem impossible. After all, for many, the deepest hurt and crushing betrayal was inflicted by their most trusted relationship.

Your heart-break is real. Your experience shifted the logical and thinking part of your brain to the side while the life-saving default of fight, flight, freeze, or please took over. Responding shifted to reacting, similar to our automatic reaction when encountering a hot stove.

Interestingly, what is deeply hurtful to you may not have the same impact on another. Your strong reaction compared to someone else who is not affected can make us question “Am I crazy?” or “Am I making this callousness into a catastrophe?” or “Am I not strong enough to handle real life?” or “Why am I in so much pain I can hardly breathe while everyone else is fine?” or “What is wrong with me?”

Take a deep breath and still your questions for a moment. Yes, your emotions are God-given gauges that tell you something has happened to your heart. Happiness reflects welcome events. Sadness reflects disappointing circumstances, and devastation can be the result of abandonment, abuse, and addiction.

Your experience is yours alone. And you are okay to feel the honest response to your experience. In this place of acknowledgement is the beginning of healing. Understand the depth of the wound, although plumbing the extent of the impact is often hurtful in itself. God meets us in our pain. He is there when we measure the damage and ask, “Did someone hurt me this deeply because I am not valuable?”

While it is natural to compare ourselves to what we think others experience, we can only be certain of our own feelings. And right now, you feel overwhelmed with grief. Your heart and soul are suffering. Where can you go to find relief from the pain?

Instead of responding to our pain, we can react by self-medicating with alcohol, food, shopping, or diving into a new relationship to soothe the loneliness temporarily. While tempting, these actions provide momentary relief, but the results compound the wreckage. Worse, this added destruction is not other-inflicted but self-inflicted. The added remorse multiplies the pain and self-loathing.

Where do you go to ease bruised feelings and fragile emotions? With the psalmist in Psalm 121 we cry, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?” The answer follows, “My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.”

Jesus Christ knows how you feel. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not,” describes Isaiah 53:3.

He’s been where you are. You can trust Him to be gentle with your bruised and broken heart, with your faint hope for a better tomorrow. Allow the Lord to be with you and tend your hurting places.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, You see me. You know the hurt that shrivels my spirit. Thank You for being with me even in dark places. I trust that You can heal without judgment or shame. I can rest in Your embrace because You are gentle to my bruised heart and soul. In Jesus’ name, Amen.