Heart Tracks - Worship In The Darkness - Part Two

My heart is troubled and restless.
Days of suffering torment me.
28 I walk in gloom, without sunlight.
I stand in the public square and cry for help. Job 30:27-28....Heartbroken - "To be overcome by sorrow."....."It's a gift to God when we worship in the darkness...Worshiping God through the longest night changes who we are." Sheila Walsh

Have you ever been truly heart broken? I don't mean just disappointed over plans gone wrong, or an unexpected setback, or that you didn't get the gift you really wanted. I mean the kind of heartbreak defined above...that which yields a life completely overcome by sorrow. Have you ever had that kind of heartbreak? Do you have it right now? If so, what do you do with it?

There have been several points in my life and ministry when I have been in that place. I know the meaning of loss, both in my personal and ministry life. I know too the deep pain and sorrow that have been my companion in both. I know what Job felt as he uttered the above words. I lived them. Maybe you live them now. Maybe you have suffered the loss of a loved one, a marriage, or the rebellion of a beloved child. Perhaps you're walking through the drying up of a ministry that once bore much fruit, but seems a desert right now. Maybe it's the heartbreak of watching ones that you have prayed for, ministered to, actively loved, make life choices that have taken them far from Him, and you, and placed them on the pathway to destruction both in this life and the life to come. You're overwhelmed by sorrow, and you have found, continue to find, that that which your broken heart must have, cannot be fully found in well meaning friends, trained counselors, or the passage of time. It can only be found in Him, yet He is too often is the last One we will turn to, or not turn to at all.

I am not against praying friends or compassionate counselors. They have their part, but too often, we can find a false comfort in their sympathies. They treat our wounds, but they cannot heal them. For that to happen requires something very radical on our part. We must bring our heartbreak, that empty, hollow, aching mass within us, to His feet....and surrender it, all of it, to Him. This can be so much harder than we think. We can insist on holding on to it, nurturing it, growing it, and in the process, be held captive by it. We are mortally wounded, but for us there is no healing, no wholeness, no hope....yet it needn't be so.

Hannah was a woman who knew the deepest heartbreak. She had no son, and so was considered cursed in the culture in which she lived. For years, she cried out to Him for a son, and all the while was subject to ridicule from others, to the disdain of others. She struggled with that heartbreak for years until one day, she came before Him, and released it all to Him....as her gift. All she had to give Him was her sorrow....and He took it.....and gave her back Life...Hope....and the promise of a son. But it didn't stop there. Her most precious dream and desire was for that son...and she surrendered that son to Him. A son who would be God's man, Samuel.
In her darkness, she worshiped Him. In the darkness she gave Him the gift of all her sorrow, and the gift of her most cherished dream. And He gave her back Himself. She arose from the long night of worship in the midst of sorrow a changed, transformed woman. Healed. Whole. His.

Are you brokenhearted today? Where do you take it? To who do you take it? Do you look for sympathy, or do you look for Life. Sympathizers are plentiful. Healing is found in only one place...at His feet. To which will you go? To which have you come?

Blessings,
Pastor O