Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about heartbreak.
The human heart has an amazing capacity for being broken, wouldn’t you agree?
Heartbreak can be caused by a myriad of symptoms: loss, regret, emptiness, pain, tragedy, time…
Something that I have become intimately acquainted with on Race has been, without sounding too dramatic here, the true depth of real heartbreak.
Let me explain myself a little further by unpacking all the ways I’ve learned heartbreak can occur.
First of all: hearing peoples’ stories can, and most definitely will, break your heart.
To hear the unfathomable loss that some humans have suffered; to hear firsthand of the torture they bore, the damage they’ve endured, the trauma they have experienced and have to live in the aftermath of every single day will without a doubt change you.
Their stories will become heavy stones that attach themselves to your heart. The weight of these stones begin to cause enough pressure that cracks form on the surface of your heart, and eventually the sadness settles into those cracks and you begin to fall to pieces. You will never forget those stories, nor the faces of the humans they belong to, and you will carry them with you until time stops.
That, however, is one form of beauty that is found in heartbreak. That beauty teaches you to have a perspective that reaches far beyond you and your own community, even beyond your own culture. That perspective catapults your vision onto a global level, and breeds a depth of empathy and a death of privilege so overwhelming that you could never have begun to imagine until you had lived it firsthand. This beauty borne from heartbreak ultimately breeds change.
Second of all: the unforgivable pairing of time and distance inevitably breaks your heart, too.
It heightens your awareness and sheds light onto the truth that hurts beyond comfort, the knowledge that life back home was always meant to go on without you.
Your best friend meets the love of her life while you’re away, and even though you try to console yourself with the fact that while at least she won’t get married without you standing beside her, you do face the harsh reality that you won’t be there for the other important days.
You won’t be there to help plan her bridal shower, nor will you be able to attend her bachelorette party. You won’t be there to see the very first time she puts on THE dress, and your breath won’t be taken away by the ethereal glory of that moment. You won’t be there to help screen DJ’s, and balance pre-wedding inter-family drama, to help calm her crazy nerves when she starts to try and talk herself out of the whole thing.
Fifteen years of memories more precious than rare jewels have accumulated between the two of you, but you must accept that you were never meant to walk those steps leading up to the big day beside her. Trust me, that breaks your heart.
Another example: a cherished woman that you love deeply, a woman who gracefully assumed the position when your own mother was too sick to act as your mother, receives an unimagineable diagnosis.
The same, deeply hated diagnosis of Cancer-with-a-capital-C that stole so many irreplaceable years of your mother’s life from her now threatens the life of this treasured woman whom you never thought you’d have to live without.
You get the news via text on your phone, on the first day you connect to wifi in almost two weeks, at some insignificant internet café somewhere in Cambodia, and as you stare dumbfounded at the words on the screen, you suddenly can’t feel your legs. You have trouble moving your head, or formulating any thoughts or words…
But even though your body seems to have shut down, you can so deeply feel in the very center of your core that your heart is breaking. Now you have to accept the fact that you were never meant to be nearby when this tragedy stuck.
Even when all you want to do is jump on the next plane to the west coast and return home to hold everyone involved in your arms and walk that pain-filled, atrociously ugly road with them, you must instead wrestle with the revelation that God always knew this would happen. And he still meant for you to be in Cambodia and Botswana while this news was unfolding and the diagnosis was being formulated. The betrayal you feel at that moment will most definitely break your heart.
Third of all, and finally: the quiet moment of understanding when God asks you to give something up, something that you love and hold more valuable than anything in the world, will most assuredly break your heart and the pain of this heartbreak will seem unforgivable.
The shock you experience when He says, “Give it up without holding on to any hope that you will ever get it back,” breaks your heart.
The uncontrollable rage that floods through your entire body when you realize He waited until the moment you stepped foot into South Africa, the one country in which you were going to pursue that end-all, be-all dream of white shark behavioral science, before revealing to you those dreams are never going to come true, breaks your heart.
The white-hot sense of injustice you feel when you hammer Him with questions like, “Haven’t I been obedient? Haven’t I followed you faithfully? How could you deal me cards like these??” breaks your heart.
The overwhelming magnitude of the realization that, once most of the rage subsides, you love the Lord more than you have ever loved white sharks, because even though it breaks your heart to do what God has asked you to do, you still obey Him.
The beauty and the raw confusion of that realization will break your heart ten ways to Sunday. This, I promise you.
Listen, folks: I’ve given you some examples of what it looks like to experience heartbreak on the Race, and I’m not about to sell you some smoke-and-mirrors mumbo-jumbo that the Race is always a grand, glorious, glamorous adventure.
It’s hot, 100% of the time. And dusty. Your stomach always hurts.
The water doesn’t just taste funny, it makes you sick. You’re never free from a plague of mosquitos, and the creeping fear that they may be carrying something sinister in their veins.
The floor is hard and is rarely clean. The bus rides are long. The language barriers can be exhausting.
The commitment to loving your team well, the way Christ calls you to, sometimes feels impossibly unattainable.
The poverty you see and the injustice you witness makes you sick to your stomach and sometimes gives you nightmares.
More often than not, something about spending eleven months constantly moving, and saying goodbye, and dying to your own needs and wants in order to serve people the way Christ calls us to, inevitably breaks your heart.
Shatters it. Beyond compare, beyond recognition.
But the beauty in that (For the gift inside heartbreak is that it always carries at least one magnificent stroke of raw beauty) is that a shattered heart allows so much space for the Holy Spirit to enter into; in the end, He brings purpose to your heartbreak.
He brings clarity, and comfort.
He facilitates trust because He is trustworthy.
I’d be lying if I said Botswana left me completely unscathed.
I remember crying myself to sleep over various heartbreaks like the ones above more nights than I would like to admit… But without the heaviness of that heartbreak to carry around for the entirety of that month (and most of this one, also) I wouldn’t have built up the strength to face the remainder of the Race.
I would have given up.
I almost did when I experienced the fresh heartbreak of inadvertently hurting my niece by not being there when she needed me most.
When my sister messaged me wondering where I was, because she was at her wits’ end, and sweet Ally had the flu and had been crying for me all night long, and I wasn’t there.
I wasn’t there for her, and she needed me to be there.
I almost gave up and came home right then, but then God did a funny thing. He gave me strength, His strength, to keep going.
He ended up teaching me the most important lesson about heartbreak of all: first of all, it’s never permanent, and it always makes you stronger.
That is why heartbreak is so powerful.
Through it, Christ makes us infinitely stronger.
That is why the human heart has such a fantastic capacity and resilience for heartbreak.
Keep feeling it, my loves. Don’t chase it away, whatever pain you’re carrying in your heart.
The Lord is teaching you something that will transform you into something more.
This I can most certainly promise you, for this is what I’ve learned most during the last two and a half months of the Race.
God is always moving, and He is always good, even when it’s hard for us to say those words out loud sometimes. It doesn’t change the fact that those words are still true.
End of story.
