This guest post comes from Sarah Short, inspired by a recent message on Jacob and Leah.
Have you ever experienced deep disappointment and heartache? The kind that blows up your life, makes you angry, and causes you to question God’s goodness to you?
I have. Most people I know have. And, I’m guessing you have, too.
– Maybe someone deeply hurt and betrayed you.
– Maybe you really wanted something to work out, and it just didn’t. Maybe you feel like it never does.
– Maybe you are suffering with a life-threatening physical illness. Or someone you love is.
– Maybe you’re lonely, certain that your loneliness will swallow you whole.
Maybe, like so many, you’re wondering, “What is God POSSIBLY doing with my broken heart?”
I have had no small number of battles with God where I’ve looked up wondered, “WHY this, God? Why won’t you fix it? Do you even care?”
If you’re anything like me, God often seems like a distant and cold ruler in times like these – complacent, if not entirely immune to our sorrow because surely He could fix it. So that’s when we begin plotting. We come up with ways to fix whatever it is that He has let go terribly wrong.
If God won’t fix it, then I will.
Leah knows this deep disappointment. She knows what it’s like to have a broken heart. Having always lived in the shadow of her beautiful sister, Rachel, married to a man that not only does not love her, but her father tricked into marrying her, she tries to find the “fix” to her situation. (Genesis 29)
She has a son. And, then another. And, then another. Because surely, now her husband will love her. Well, he didn’t.
When Leah realizes that God set His great love on her and that He is the one true source of her joy – not her circumstances, not the love of her husband, not getting back at her sister – she bears a fourth son, Judah, the ancestor through whom Jesus would be born. “This time,” she says, “I will praise the LORD.”
She didn’t win the love of her husband. God’s love won her heart.
Aren’t we Leah? Aren’t we “fixers?” Don’t we press and toil to try and find the “fix” for each of life’s disappointments and heartaches?
But think about this: What if our broken hearts are God’s only way in?
What if through life’s great disappointments and sorrow – our hearts break open and allow God to come in and stitch, heal, and make new again what was once cold, tough, and callous?
What if our breakable hearts are the key to God’s unbreakable, never-stopping, never giving up, always and forever love?
In all of our heartaches, disappointments, and deep longings, we are really searching for one thing: the love of Jesus. It is his love that fills us. It is his love that carries us through whatever trials we face.
And, it is his love that will use our broken hearts – to break through our stubbornness and break down our idols so that we can see that He is our one true source of joy, approval, and love.
We will always struggle through disappointments and hurt. We aren’t made for this world; we’re made for another. The truth of that is made plainly clear in our pain and struggles and longing for things to be made right.
But, today – whatever pain and hurt it brings – we have this great promise:
We don’t have to fix what’s wrong. We have a Savior, Jesus, who has fixed his great love on us.
