Sunday, November 13, 2011

Break My Heart, Lord

Break my heart for what breaks yours.  Those words in a popular song by Hillsong United often resonate with me.  I have found myself thinking intently about them lately and trying to figure out what they really mean.

With 24-Hour News, internet and cell phones w/ internet, we are exposed to story after story after story that could and probably should break our hearts.  There are earthquakes, starving children, tornadoes, domestic abuse, disease, cancer, death, greed, and all kinds of cruelness in our world.  And more than ever before, we are exposed to all of these facts of life every single day.

I am fully convinced that all of these things do break the heart of God.  He did not create us to go through all of this pain, and did want our world to be so BROKEN.  The fact of the matter is, however, that we do live in a broken world and bad things happen.

As a Christian, I often feel  guilty because my heart is not always broken when I am exposed to these things.  So many times I hear about these horrible things and my heart turns callous.  I get down on myself because I can hear about the earthquake destruction in Japan or Haiti, and not feel the pain and loss that I should.  At times the thought quickly disappears and my mind moves to some small thing in my own life.

I have finally realized that as a human, I honestly cannot take all of that pain on myself.  It would bury me.  If I would internalize and have a broken heart for all of the pain and loss that I hear about, I could not survive the pain.

Lord, Break my heart freely when you want it to be broken.  My prayer is that I am in sync with God enough that my hard, callous heart can be broken when it needs to be.  When I need to feel and internalize pain of others, I pray that God will break my heart when he wants to and in turn spur me into action to do my part.

Again, my focus needs to be on knowing God and spending time with him and not on trying to conquer the world in his name.  I do not understand or have the answers for all of the pain in the world, but I know the ONE that does.  I can stand on that.

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