“Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up.  They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”

– Samuel Johnson

Has your heart been broken?  There have been times when I have thought mine is fractured beyond repair, yet here I sit with my heart still beating.  Life is filled with challenges, and sometimes those challenges can seem insurmountable.  If I think about the conversations I’ve had in the last week alone, three people come to mind who are struggling with such painful life experiences that they wonder if they will be able to recover and regroup and go on living.  As sad as these times are, and as dearly as we wish we could skip such experiences and simply live happily ever after, the truth is that we grow the most in the midst of our pain.  We simply do not recognize that growth until the painful part has ended and we reflect on the ways we have changed.

There are so many examples I could offer of the phenomenon of growth after breaking, but I will go directly to the most profound example in my own life, so far.  My mind returns to a day in February 1980 when my son, Brett, was playing outside with his brother and some neighborhood children.  In the midst of the excitement of playing and with all the impulsive energy of an almost-seven-year-old, he darted into the quiet street in front of our house and was hit by a car.  He did not survive the traumatic injuries he suffered, and my life was forever changed in a split second.  My heart was broken — no, my heart was shattered.  It exploded into a million shards, and there were days when I really wasn’t sure that it still was beating.  I was certain in the days and months that followed that I would never again know happiness, that I would never again feel safe in this world, that I would never again risk loving another child as deeply as I had loved my son.  The pain was simply unbearable.

What followed this time was an equally painful task of gathering up the million shards of my heart and returning them to the place at the center of myself so that I could try to discover who I was now that everything had been taken from me.  Each shard, it seemed, had razor-sharp edges; and retrieving them was a long and difficult process.  There were many events that followed my shattering and contributed to the healing of my heart.  I will share one with you today, because it offers an example of the way we can use our own experience of breaking and regeneration to encourage others who face pain that seems insurmountable.

In the months after Brett died, I spent every minute of every day terrified that something awful might happen to one of my surviving children.  My duty seemed to be to worry about them, as though my worrying might have some effect on the outcome of their days and somehow keep them safe.  As you might imagine, all this worrying was making me ill.  Not only did I live with constant anxiety and dread, but I was beginning to have physical symptoms as well.  Although I was only thirty years old, I worried that I might die of some terrible thing that was taking over my body.  I made an appointment with my doctor — a bona fide country doctor, whose home was a farm and whose feet were planted firmly on the ground.  He listened to my worries about my health and then asked me how my family was doing.  Out poured all my fear and all my worry for the safety of my other children, and he responded with some wisdom that was the turning point in my healing.

“Do you garden?” he asked me, knowing from past encounters that I did.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Do you grow tomatoes?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Which would you rather have for lunch today —  a warm, juicy tomato from the garden with a few blemishes and a bug or two or a beautiful, smooth, pink tomato from the hothouse?”

“The garden tomato, of course.”

“Well, then,” he said as he looked me square in the eye, “don’t be in the business of growing hothouse tomatoes.  You probably won’t be happy with the results.”

In that moment, I understood what he was saying.  I was spending so much time trying to assure that no hurt would come to my children that I was not allowing them to grow strong.  I was doing the same to myself, and I realized that there were many painful things that had come my way before the loss of my son that hadn’t even made me blink.  In the aftermath, all pain felt the same, and it would have felt devastating if my child had so much as skinned a knee.  I needed to find my strength again.  I needed to find my ability to discern survivable pain from the kind that takes life away.  And so my healing began.

I picked up a huge shard of my heart that day — the one that vowed not to let fear overrule reason as I allowed my children to grow in the garden instead of the hothouse.  The miraculous thing is that once the first heart-shard was back where it belonged, it became easier and easier to reclaim the others.  My heart will always bear the scars of this experience, but scar tissue is pretty tough.  As grief and fear gave way to healing, I discovered that I could be happy again and that I could again feel secure enough to move forward with living instead of sitting in a corner, paralyzed by fear and dread.  No less that five more children have come into my heart and into my family since that time; and I have learned that I can, indeed, love them wholeheartedly.

Wholeheartedly.  Did I really say that?  In many ways, I think the growth that has followed my sorrow has made my heart bigger and stronger than it was before it knew shattering.  In gathering the shards and putting them back together, I discovered some strong glue that has become a part of my healing — Love, which surrounds me and uplifts me; Truth, which pushes fear into the background and allows me to walk with confidence; and Faith, which reminds me on difficult days that the outcome of every challenge will be growth.

If you are one of the three people I carry in my heart as I write today, I hope you will find comfort in hearing my experience.  We are not so different, you know; and it is part of being human to have these experiences.  Without them we would never have the incentive to become more than we are.