Broken Heart Ceiling

You know the broken heart. Not the physical one, but the one that rains tears and is so devastated that it makes your stomach feel like someone soccer-punched it. That one. The one that suddenly awakens to the crush of cumulative mean things said to it over time and decides, unannounced, that today will be the day it completely breaks.

You walk through your normal circle of a day and wonder how all these people around you are breathing. Oh, right...today is not their broken-heart day. But since their broken-heart day will come--from tragedy, from mean things said and/or done, from something--if we figure out a next step for today's broken heart, could it help?

I think the trickiest part of a broken heart is that it changes how we see ourselves. If it is from an accumulation of mean things said, then our picture of self is like a mirror that has dozens (or hundreds) of mean-darts stuck to it--they become like a frame around it that holds your image of yourself. The mean-things-frame makes you question the very journey of your personality.

Is there a next step that makes a difference? I mean besides breathe and keep getting up every day? I think it is to cry out to someone you trust and let their mirror of you be the one you hear until your strength comes back--the strength needed to ask God to change out the mean-things frame and replace it with His view-of-you frame.

Is this a ceiling? Of the worst kind. The energy for our calling needs to come from the confidence we have in our person, our personality, and our pursuit. A mean-things frame will rock every bit of confidence we have and put a ceiling on our willingness to participate in the adventure of life. May today not be your broken-heart day. But since it is inevitable, may it be short-lived and turned around quickly with the mirror that suits us best: God's view of us.

Can I Really Feed My Heart?

Sometimes it pays to revisit an idea. This was posted on November 17, 2011:

Let's suppose that there is a "ceiling" on our love intake--our ability to receive love from others and God--and that raising that ceiling would increase our intake. If this love intake is nutrition for the heart, we would be successfully "feeding our heart." But how?

Dr. Fred Luskin is the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project. He writes in this month's Guideposts magazine that "forgiveness is a skill you can develop and practice like any other" and is "a choice to heal yourself." We know eating well is a skill that we can develop and practice and is, truly, a choice to heal our bodies (or not!). Similarly, some of the heart's best nutrition may be targeting those feelings of resentment and unforgiveness and replacing the space they occupy in our hearts with Dr. Luskin's steps to understanding and accomplishing forgiveness. The action is up to us, not the person who offended us.

It would be ridiculous to eat a huge amount of candy and hope our bodies converted it into the nutritional value of broccoli. So why, as Dr. Luskin writes, do we hold onto resentment that is like poison to our bodies and hope the other person will die?

The first step to truly feeding our heart is to take responsibility for what we find there, what we discard, and what we feed it into the future. If the tradeoff for doing the hard work of feeding our heart is receiving more love from others and God-raising that ceiling of love intake--exactly what are we waiting for?

Are you eating any poison?

Ceilings That Limit Us

In graduate school for teaching reading, I was fascinated to learn that a child's ability to read silently and comprehend corresponds to his ability to interact in conversation. In other words, his ability to speak and listen is a ceiling on his ability to read and comprehend. Solution: more development of oral language skills.

So do ceilings affect us in other areas? What if our love intake is the ceiling to our interacting with the world? Love intake means how we receive love from others and from God. It is risky to let ourselves be loved by people because it is always imperfect, often hurtful at times, and needs our vulnerability to let it happen. Though love from God is perfect, we often have doubt and misinformation about that love that acts as a barrier to us receiving it.

Maybe you know someone who is "anorexic" in receiving love. Though love hovers all around that person, there is an invisible ceiling that stops it from being absorbed in his/her heart. Love is the nutrition of our heart, so much like an anorexic rejects food, a love anorexic has a mindset that pushes away love. Somehow there is the idea that he/she is so unlovable and undeserving that the ceiling creates a starved heart.

In our quest this month to get rid of STUFF, maybe the most powerful place to work is with our love intake. Ponder if you are able to receive all the love that hovers around you from family, friends and God. In the next post, we will explore steps to raise the ceiling and feed our strength by feeding our hearts.