Healing Lessons of the Heart

By Erin Coulombe

Lately I’ve been learning a lot of lessons. But they’ve been a little different from the ones I normally learn.

 

I’m learning that a single decision can change absolutely everything, your attitude, your focus and you heart. Sometimes decisions that we see as being less than game changing turn out to be just that. They end up changing absolutely everything.

 

Lessons of the heart are strange. They’re really fragile and hard to explain. But lately I’ve learned something important about the heart. I’ve learned that there’s a balance between guarding your heart and making yourself vulnerable. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, there is true beauty in vulnerability. There’s beauty of remaining courageous in the face of possible pain and opening yourself up to love and affection.

 

I’m kind of a mess. I change my mind constantly. I’m weird, and I’m typically completely unfocused. But one part of my little mess that I’m slowly cleaning up is the part that’s afraid to forgive and quick to judge. That’s a part of my mess that I’m never particularly proud of. It’s a part of my mess that prevents me from accepting others completely like God calls me to.

 

I think sometimes we forget that we’re called to things like that. I think we forget that we are called to pursue divine qualities such as a forgiving heart and non-judgmental eyes. Those are the characteristics that grant us a heart capable of Godly love. And, I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of love I want to pursue in my everyday relationships.

 

I know it’s hard to forgive. But the wholeness you experience when you do is uncanny. Because as much as we would like to believe that holding grudges cracks our relationships with others, it doesn’t. It cracks our relationship with our soul. It allows us to harbor guilt and anger that are poisonous to the pure Spirit that Christ wishes to instill in us.

 

And the freedom that you experience upon emancipating yourself from those things is the type of freedom that love and compassion thrive in. And that love and compassion can cover up just about any wound that was caused by the original infraction or assault.

 

As weird as it is, sometimes it’s those people who break your heart that are most capable of granting it a proper situation in which to heal. And sometimes it takes the breaking of a heart to remind a person what it should have valued originally and how it should have expressed that value to others.

 

“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” // Galatians 6:9

 

P.S. You are enough.

Photo credit // Elissa Voss Photography