The best way to help a struggling heart is to simply be available.
Anyone can choose to be a safe space for others to share their hearts.
Anyone can make room for honest conversation, welcoming another soul to unburden itself of whatever heaviness is weighing it down.
All it takes is a listening ear and time.
Our local high schools hold graduation ceremonies this week. Such an exciting time for so many families!
My Facebook newsfeed is flooded with senior pictures intermingled with baby photos and exclamations by mamas that they have absolutely NO IDEA where the time has gone.
I totally get it.
I graduated four from high school and college and a couple from graduate school. And it’s true-all the while you are raising these children it seems like the days are long.
But one day you look up from the hard work of motherhood and realize the years were short.
Too short.
Thankfully for most parents graduation isn’t really an end. It marks a transition and perhaps growing geographical distance, but the relationship will continue.
Your child may be harder to reach, but they are not utterly beyond your reach.
It may take more effort to arrange lunch or birthday parties or holiday gatherings, but they will still happen.
You might stand at the doorway of their empty room and wonder when they might come home for a visit and wake up under your roof again, but they WILL come home for a visit.
I’m not diminishing the very real sense of loss parents feel when the child they have nurtured begins a life apart.
Empty nest is a real thing.
It’s a hard thing. It takes time to make necessary adjustments.
But some of us face something harder.
My child is utterly unreachable. There are no phone calls, texts, Facebook messages or goofy Instagram updates on what he is doing while away from my sight. He will never sit at my Thanksgiving table again or celebrate his birthday with a cake or special meal. No more presents under the Christmas tree.
And just like you who feel that time has been both fast and slow leading up to graduation-it seems that way to me, too.
Unbearably long since I heard his voice, saw his face and hugged his neck. Yet also just yesterday since the full weight of his leaving landed hard on my heart.
I understand how it feels to miss my child in a way I hope you never have to.
I’ve lived with invisible chronic disease for a decade.
From the outside looking in, you’d hardly know that I am often in great pain. I make daily choices about what I will do and what I won’t do based on what I can do and what my body refuses to do.
I take medication. I do all the things I’m supposed to do to help my body heal.
But I cannot MAKE the healing happen.
No matter how hard I wish it were different, no matter how carefully I manage my treatment, healing comes (or doesn’t) in its own time.
I’m pretty sure that most people have experienced something similar if they’ve broken a bone or had a bad bout of bronchitis or pneumonia.
Other than following the advice of your doctor and taking your meds on time, resting and eating well, there’s not much you can do to force your body to get well.
A broken heart is just the same.
All I can do is place myself in the path of healing. I can feed my soul with truth and drink living water from God’s Word.
I can lean in and rest in the promise that Jesus will redeem and restore.
I can do the work that grief requires.
And working on healing takes energy, effort and time–lots and lots of TIME.
I cannot hurry the healing.
Please understand that as inconvenient, uncomfortable and disconcerting it may be for YOU, it is immeasureably more so for ME.
Please be patient with my heart.
I’m really trying.
thelifeididntchoose 