Patchwork

These days, hearts get bumped, scratched, and broken very easily. I don't think we give enough credit to the severity of that. Our hearts were given to us whole, that's how they are meant to stay, in an ideal world of course. But it's because hearts aren't meant to be broken, or otherwise injured, that it feels so unnatural when they are. That's why it hurts so much.

As humans, many time when something is broken we naturally want to fix it. If a car or computer is broken, we call in the necessary people to come and fix it for us. If a piece on a child's toy comes off, we may help them by gluing it back on. If we get a hole in our favorite piece of clothing, we may seek to patch it up. Unfortunately, fixing our heart is not so easy. When someone breaks our heart, leaves it torn up with holes all through it, we feel the same need to fix it. So when our heart has undergone this terrible trauma and is left uncomplete and hurting, we start searching frantically and blindly for anything that we can to fill up and patch our heart.

And sometimes, we try to patch up our heart with whoever left it broken in the first place. We may think to ourselves, "Well, they did a really great job of filling my empty spaces before. So if I can just hold onto them and get them to stick around, then my heart will be fixed!" Whether we think that consciously or subconsciously, our first reaction can often be to fill the hole that someone left behind, with the very person that put it there. But it doesn't have to be this way, in fact many times this attempt to fix the heart in this way just makes it worse than before.

In discussing this topic with a friend, I realized something. We cannot effectively patch our own hearts. Can we awkwardly fit other people and things into the holes in our heart to try to make it feel better? Absolutely. But God is the ONLY one that can truly patch our hearts up. And the great thing about letting God patch our hearts up, is that he doesn't need the old material to patch it up. He can bring completely new material into the picture in order to patch our broken heart. Which makes sense.

Growing up, whenever I would get a tear or hole in my clothes, I could take them to my mom to patch them for me. The first step in the process of patching jeans is to find similar denim material that matches them. But when you're patching something, you never use the same material that you had before. You use brand new, fresh, and stronger material than was there before.

When God patches our heart he does the same thing. He uses brand new material. Our God is not bound to having to use the same material as before. He often times has a brand new and much better material in mind. So in order to let God mend our broken hearts, we have to walk away from the old and follow Him towards whatever He has in mind to patch that hole. Don't put God in a box, and don't give him limited material to work with either.