The Story of the Heart

Today you broke, and tomorrow you may break again. You seem to spend countless days lost in a fight of survival, unseen, unheard but fighting nonetheless.

Keep going, those words incite a bitterness on your heart you attempt to cleanse, in one phrase many have offered a vain attempt to sympathize and yet offer nothing tangible. If only words could save the world yours would look a lot different.

But stay, stay in it. Feel it. Sit in the grave. Everyday you know it’s there. You wander around death like it’s a playground. You can’t understand how it came to be so prevalent, how you got here but you breathe it so regularly life feels foreign. Living feels unusual and laughing feels like a breath you’ve waited years for.

You fight to feel it, day in and day out because you know that redemption comes through the grave. So in the windows of time where your world pauses for but a moment you feel the tragedy, the depth of loss, the broken promises, the darkness that is trying to steal the very life you still believe might exist one day. If only you can survive long enough to see it.

So you fight on, and you ask yourself how to overcome, how to win, how to breathe again….and you begin to violently take back the pieces of your heart. You search for them like they are your last hope because deep inside you believe they are. You know that if you can’t manage to rebuild this time, if you fail, you lose, the war is over and destiny is a distant dream.

You know you’ll break again, you know darkness won’t ever stop fighting you. As children of light and warriors of the day, night is bound to pursue the daylight.

You know you’ll break again, you know darkness won’t ever stop fighting you. As children of light and warriors of the day, night is bound to pursue the daylight. Seasons will change and you’ll be here again. Maybe not this space or place but it’ll feel dark and you’ll know that the war came back…and you’ll fight it, based off what you learn today.

So today you stay in the fight and you search for your heart, and you rise and rise again. You find all the pieces and you ever so carefully begin to reconstruct yourself. You realize that the rebuilding is much more important than the breaking ever was. Breaking is inevitable but rebuilding is a choice. That’s on you.

How you rebuild. What you rebuild. Who you rebuild. It’s the greatest decision you will ever make so you, again violently fight to heal. You restrain from harboring bitterness and pocketing rage and you seek out safe hearts to journey with. Other souls that will help to lead you on the path of rediscovering your own. Other hearts who are fighting to win the battle of pain. The souls who are determined to win the battle darkness has waged against the wholeness of hearts.

The souls who are determined to win the battle darkness has waged against the wholeness of hearts.

And you stand by these hearts and when you feel the pain turn to rage you share the thoughts, and speak the feelings to the hearts that will see your pain apart from your destiny.

More than anything you viciously fight to love. You love those who broke you, stole from you, cheated you of your right to happiness. You violently wage a war against the enemy fighting for their soul and you speak life into the darkness. From your grave to theirs you choose to believe in the power of redemption. You choose to believe that grace is already at work in a healing you can only dream of. And even if nothing is ever what it was you know that you can’t afford to put up boundaries that will supersede the great redemption being revealed in your life and theirs. For God will respect your boundaries even at the cost of healing, it’s the downside of free will.

You get to choose to walk in wholeness. You get to choose to walk through the grave or spend your life touring the cemetery of your memories. And so day in and day out you decide. Like an addict returns to a substance, death waits daily for a face off. Will you choose to fight another day and endure to a life that you know is only built through the grave or will you weaken and lay there, lost in the brokenness?

Redemptive life isn’t for the weak, endurance is the only road. And so you gather the strength for one more day and slowly, very very slowly you begin to build, build through the grave.

The story isn’t over, you’re not even at the climax yet. But glimpses of beauty pass, words spoken from the few who can validate your pain, you pocket those and read them back to yourself when the darkness rages. You hold to promises from long ago. The ones many would’ve given up on, you clench your fists and you wage war against the entity that tried to steal the very fuel that would keep you going, hope. For without hope, vision perishes and the battle is lost. Hope is your weapon. You protect it, ever so closely you seal it into a room deep within your soul, a room only you have ever known. The secret room that holds the very depths of your existence. Hope.

Hope lives there. And if darkness destroys everything else, you will fight to the death before it destroys that secret place. In that place hides the depths to your soul that one day will become reality. Like seeds hidden in darkness long before they ever grow great enough to see the light so these fragile, tender parts of you are tucked away waiting for the moment. The moment when the world you live in becomes safe enough for them to exist in the daylight. The moment when they become stronger than any war within the grave. The moment of promise that you live everyday believing will come into existence.

One day this season of enduring will end and you’ll stand in the world you built through the grave, the promise will break forth into reality and vulnerability will have created the momentum that moved you forward.

The stories you wrote with the hearts along the way. The memories of life and the memories of the grave both you’ve embraced as one in the same. You’ve finally realized the healing you’ve waited for, fought for and pursued with your entire being. And you found it in the hearts of others, the depths of your heart and glory of grace that covered every space within your world and theirs. Healing is only permitted where grace was allowed.

And so you move forward in grace like never before. You love fearlessly because you have understood the power of grace as the conduit of healing. One day you’ll break again but thanks to this grave you’ve found part of the person your destiny required. You no longer fear the brokenness more than the fulfillment because you’ve seen evidence of redemption within your soul. The soul that entered the grave isn’t the same as the soul who built it’s way through the grave. You became. You became whole when the pieces seemed so shattered. You became fuller, greater and stronger. In the dark times when you thought the pain had no purpose and that maybe healing would never come you slowly became the person your destiny required.

Because of your choice to build through the pain the depths of the darkness today became the greatness of fulfillment tomorrow.

You overcame darkness with light and the grave with the promise.

xoxo, me