The secret of healing hearts...

 

C.S. Lewis once said,  "To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Who can proclaim, "I have never suffered from a broken heart!"?  No one!  It is part of the human experience.  I can say with confidence that all the people in my life at least once found their heart in pieces.  The question is not "will my heart get broken?” but rather "when and why will my heart get broken?”  I hate that.  The certainty of the fragility of the heart.  Ah, to make it stronger, resistant, insensitive!  What?  Insensitive?  Yes!  That would be ideal.  If only my heart could feel nothing, if no emotion could ever touch or penetrate it, if I could simply stop it from wanting and dreaming and needing, then it would never be broken.  But to train a heart to be so disconnected from human emotions is simply not possible (unless one is willing to lose its humanness in the process). 
Here's another solution... It's just a thought, but I think it's worth something.  Stop expecting.  Most of the broken hearts I have met out there, including my own, have been broken as the result of unmet expectations.  Sometimes those expectations are realistic, sometimes they are not, but in all cases, still, unmet expectations caused the heart to brake.  So, stop expecting.
Are you expecting in someone today, putting your hope in them and what they can give you?  Don't. Are you expecting a job or a new challenge in life to fulfill you?  Stop.  Are you expecting in others and waiting for them to change?  They probably won't (and if they do, you had nothing to do with it!).  Are you expecting, hoping, and wishing in anything else other than God alone?  A broken heart awaits you!
So maybe I titled my blog incorrectly.  It's not so much the secret of healing hearts, but more correctly the secret of content hearts.  A heart that is content will not likely or easily be broken.  How does a heart attain contentment?  By letting it aspire to be close to God alone, letting it rest in the immutability of God:  He does not change, He does not let down, He does not disappoint.  He is always there, He always loves, and He never lets go.  Your heart cannot be broken, or at least, not as devastatingly (and with a lot more hope for restoration!) if it hopes in God. 
And rest assured:  It will never be broken by the One who molded it, made, it and is holding it.  It cannot.

"My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him."  Psalm 62:5