Heartbreak Isn't Always Terrible...
A friend's teenage daughter recently went through a breakup with a boy she'd been dating for a couple years. As one would expect, she's pretty heartbroken over it, and she asked me how you heal from a broken heart.
I wish I had the right words to tell her. Sometimes I wonder if you ever truly heal.
The truth is that time will make it hurt a little less, but like any wound that cuts such a deep mark in your soul, you're always going to have reminders, no matter what your heartbreak is from; a love, a friend, a job, family. The memories will blur after many years. You won't remember their voice anymore and eventually, the small details you'd memorized from their face will fade away into a general recollection. But the pain somehow has a way of sticking around far longer than maybe it should.
I don't know that your heart ever truly forgets the pain of a loss.
We grow, we change, we move on. Our hearts fill with better more beautiful things. In the case of love, someone else comes into our life to remind us that we can love again, and we memorize all the small details of the new face smiling at us because our heart is full. And hopefully, you find that love that turns into a forever love.
I think it's important to remember that heartbreak isn't a terrible thing. Well, it is when we're in the midst of it and feeling all of the pain. But it is instead a reminder of the capacity our hearts have to share something with someone else. It's a reminder that we are human, that we feel, that we are capable of caring for someone else. And it's also a reminder that we've really lived.
To have heartbreak is to have taken risk, and that risk is a beautiful thing in and of itself. All the things that fall apart in our lives are really just doors that open to something new; hopefully something better. All those things we prayed for that didn't happen, didn't happen because there is something better waiting for us just around the corner.
And some of those unanswered prayers have turned out to be the very best aspects of my life.
Have you ever found that your unanswered prayers turned out to be the best answer for you?
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