Opening a Broken Heart

This Sunday marks Doubting Thomas in the church year. And there was a fantastic sermon this morning. My resident wise man was wondering if he would make an appearance in my writing because of his wise words this morning and they of course will because they fit my life perfectly right now.

The premise of most of the sermon was that we should change Thomas' name from Doubting to Brokenhearted. Thomas is not willing to believe because he is hurt. He has lost someone who he loved and he doesn't want to have to go through that again. I know what that feels like. There are times after getting hurt that you don't want to open your heart. You don't want to be open to the possibility that you can care about someone again, because then they might just hurt you . . . again.

Thomas doesn't want to believe without seeing that the one he loves may be alive, because if it turns out to not be true, then his heart will simply break a second time. It's the same for us. When we get hurt, we only want to believe that this can never happen again. We block off our hearts and decide that we can't feel the same way again. So we try to stop feeling love for those around us. Feeling love for people opens our heart to being hurt and that scares us. It doesn't mean we doubt the possibilities of love but simply that our broken hearts hurt too much.

Closing off our hearts happens in so many different ways. There is the doubt that someone else can care for us, the fear that even when we fall in love with someone they will only hurt us. We begin to doubt not only those around us, but also ourselves. None of these things are fair to us or those around us. We don't allow ourselves to love and we don't allow others to love us.

It's when we begin to open our hearts that we realize how great that feels. When we let down the drawbridge and see if there is someone standing there, willing to love us, we might be surprised. There is the fear that something might not work, but the chance that it might is far too fantastic to ignore. So opening our broken hearts is worth it, even though there are doubts and fears in doing so, is entirely worth it.