Broken Hearts and Hands

Yesterday I got my heart broken… again.  I found myself wishing for the old childhood cares - grade school heartbreaks and skinned knees.

That evening, like some divine joke (or wake-up call) I got not my knee but my finger wounded - almost broken actually, after it got caught in the car door. I blacked out for a while, hearing only the seemingly endless echo of the car door closing and my own scream. My only vivid sensation then were of the pain at the end of my left hand, the roughness against my forehead (which was the back of the driver's seat where I rested my head to get some sort of focus), and the smooth skin of Brian's neck against the fingers of my right hand (which had, of its own volition, reached around the driver's seat in the hope of conveying the message my tongue could not anymore: "Open the car door.").

Brian not only got the message and opened the door to release my fingers, when we arrived home he also got me glasses of hot and ice cold water in which to dip my fingers (not to mention helping in the soak by pushing my fingers into the water he insisted was not really that hot).

The pain eased and we were able to laugh at what happened.

Yet somehow, the hot and cold water treatment did not ease the pain in my chest, and I cried myself to sleep.

At devotional this morning, we talked about the need to let people know of their own mistakes, sharply if necessary, but always in love. I said, "the truth always hurts," and in a surge of wit added, "so do fingers caught in a car door." After the laughter died down, I continued to think of the truth that went on hurting me and I looked down at my still-hurting middle finger (the other two fingers had healed overnight).

Almost all of last night, I answered my own "whys" and "hows" and "what ifs" and I asked God for forgiveness and fortitude. The answers were all right, I know, but somehow they weren't enough.

Everything came into clearer perspective when after the devotional I went into the bathroom, thinking of broken hearts and hands, and I remembered this (from more than a year ago):

 

Then the lyrics to the old song, "And He died of a broken heart. It broke for you and me."

Suddenly, the heart and the hand didn't hurt that much anymore.