The Hard Good: Showing Up for God to Work in You When You Want to Shut DownSample

Facing Truth with an Open Heart

When we don’t deal with our brokenheartedness, it leads to more woundedness. If we’re to have any chance of opening up our hearts again, we will first have to tend to the places we’ve been wounded. We’ll need to be honest about them, call them exactly what they are, and let God do the soul surgery required for us to move forward. We’ll have to lean into our faith on a whole new level—which is always God’s goal for us.

Closed-hearted people see the world dimly. But healed people are future-focused typically, and they don’t wear that look of pain in their eyes. An open heart lives in the fullness of Christ where God can accomplish His greatest work in you and you can love your life. It’s hard to open back up a hurt heart, but it’s harder to live with a chronically closed one. I know about being hurt, and I also know about the importance of healing those hurt places and letting God redeem them. This is the whole point of going through hard things.

We can’t erase the hard things we’ve been through, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of them either. Opening up our hearts, again, doesn’t mean we don’t have wise parameters in the how, who, and when we let in. It means we don’t live closed off from future opportunities and possibilities because we aren’t healed from our past. The goal is to be healthy—no matter what unhealthy people around us do—so we can begin to be more reliant on the Lord’s instruction for what to do in every future situation. He remains the best Help. Jesus can reopen any heart from any hurt, even one that seems irreversibly shut tight.

Respond

In what experiences in your life do you need Jesus’ help to reopen your heart? (God doesn’t want us to stay bound in abusive situations in any way. I fully support having personal boundaries and concentrating our energy on life-giving relationships.)

What vision for the future with a heart open to God’s healing do you have?

What relationship do you have with God? How can building a healthy relationship with God bring freedom from the past and grow your trust in God’s love and purpose for you?