May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in. – Mother Theresa
Until our hearts are broken, I wonder if there is really room in them for anyone else – or God. One of the many nights after my wife died I lay awake and stared out the window. Moonlight filtered in through tree branches. Silent tears dripped on my pillow. The darkness was made of stone, piled to the sky, crushing me, squeezing the air from the room.
“Papa,” I gasped, “I can’t breathe. It hurts, oh God it hurts.”
“I know,” Papa/God whispered, “I’m here. ”
I felt his tears. Such deep sorrow for my pain.
“I cry with you drop for drop.”
“You do?” I suddenly wondered how many other people wept that night, how many dark and selfish decisions left shattered hearts in their wake.
“They are all my precious children. I weep for their anguish. I long to comfort and heal them. Instead they suffer alone, crushed under their darkness.”
“How can you bear it? We can be so awful to each other. No wonder you never sleep,” for the first time I really understood the heart of God. Now that I felt their hurt, I wept for them too. “Can you help them?”
“They’re afraid of me. They think I’m going to rob them of their dreams.”
“I trust you,” it had taken me a long time to get there. Over the years, one by one my dreams died. I decided to give their corpses to him. One by one he brought them back or replaced them with ones a hundred times better. This one was by far the most devastating. But now I knew the process. People kill, but Papa creates. No matter how I felt right now, my heart and my dreams were safe.
“You help them,” his presence stole the chill from the darkness. Was it lighter? “I want to heal their hurts. I want to give them dreams so much better than they even imagine. I want to fill their lives with laughter and love. You explain it to them. They can’t hear me – but they can hear you.”