Lessons well learned:

The lessons of a broken heart

I must admit it... I have had my heart broken. I am not as strong as I thought I was, and I am not as obedient as you presume me to be; my disobedience caused me pain, sorrow, and worsen the situation of my heart by shattering it, if not in half (as it is presumed by the pertaining fantasized drawings), in pieces so small, only the hand of God could fix. The damage was so great that at some point I thought all was lost- my dreams, my hopes, my future & destiny, and my notion of romance.

I confess to have lost all faith in the so called "romance." If what I had experienced was falsehood, then, I wanted nothing at all. How could one's heart deceive? How could it forget? Why did it have to be this way?

To my surprise it didn't have to be this way; it didn't have to hurt, and I didn't have to forget if I would have heard the counsel of my loved ones from the beginning. With much shame and regret I admit not having followed, I admit having gone my own way , I admit my foolishness, my hardness.

But, in the middle of my failure, my pastors, parents and friends loved me, forgave me, and lessened the pain by being the "healing" hands of God. God's words healed me, restored me, completed me and filled all the empty spaces a young man left in me. My mistake: Making an idol out of this young lad. God is consuming fire. He consumed me, and all that was between God and I. He loves me. His love is better, sweeter. Never ending.

So, who cares? It matters because if anything, I want people to know that God is righteousness. That if you disobey, there are consequences to your acts; God in His loving kindness will have to put us through the fire to refine and expose our weaknesses. God is merciful, He will take the time to heal your heart and will give wisdom to others around you to help you out of the rut. God is all in all, He is the Living water, the bread of Life; the source of Life- no man can provide for that. I speak from my own mistakes, because I became a statistic. Don't become one.

It's been a year since my "great fall," time's gone by. I've learned that my God is a good God. He desires what's best for me because He loves me.

I leave with the very words that triggered my thinking. Perhaps you will relate. Selah.

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you -- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Some have used an expedient that identify with certain moments in the past. But all of this is a cheat. If they had gone back to those moments in the past, they would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what they remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things -- the beauty, the memory of our own past -- are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us up from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundered years. "

C.S. Lewis - The Weight of Glory