BINDING UP BROKEN HEARTS

‘’God binds up the broken hearted and heals their wounds.’

We have been going through the Psalms. Reaching Psalm 147, my heart leaped as I heard this verse read. I will never forget, for it was the first time that the Bible had come alive to me – a living word. I had not long come to trust in Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. I returned home having visited a lovely motherly Christian friend.

Her grief had been terrible to behold. Having been nursing both her elderly father and her beloved
husband, exhausted, she had cried out to God that she could not go on.

Her situation eased, but it was her husband who had died, not her aged father. She was covered in terrible sores all over her legs, wounds the result of her inexpressible grief.

I had been brought up to respect the Bible as God’s word but did not know God could speak to me through it, but now I had opened my Bible and here was this wonderful word. I knew God knew and he would bring our dear Auntie Em through her grief, and he did.

Since then, I have learned to live on God’s word as he speaks to me so many times through the Bible, and yes, I have come to prove for myself that God does indeed bind up the broken hearted, for he has bound up my broken heart and healed my wounds and does and will continue to do so, and I pray this for you too.

Some of my readers may have heard this story. I believed God had promised me a husband, but I also believed God was calling me to go to the mission field.  God would not expect me to go on my own, would he?

After I had settled into life in the highlands of New Guinea, John had arrived. It had seemed a fairy tale romance, but I was left with a broken heart, wounded indeed.

Nearing forty now, I felt I could no longer go on believing for a husband and children. Miraculously, God did heal my broken heart and bind up my wounds. By faith, whatever my feelings, I learned to speak out, based on God’s word, ‘Lord, I am delighting myself in you and you are giving me the desires of my heart.’   

For the next ten years I fulfilled my calling. ‘The Little Children’s Mother,’ they called me, and I was a joyful mother of children, content, - but then God gently prepared me to hand over my responsibilities abroad.

I came home, from Ghana now, to find the husband God had for me. Recently bereaved, Joel and I had 26 joyous years together before God called him home.  

I knew that I had the husband God had chosen for me, but with this great joy was the possibility of great pain. But hadn’t the dream God gave me so long ago shown us walking together into the glory of God?

Joel had not passed his medical to be in the army yet survived many years on the mission field in good health. He reached eighty and was full of faith of what God was going to do through us. He was still preaching and then a viral infection attacked both of us. The doctor assured me he was over it but a few days later he was gone.

 

The morning he died, I had been into one of our Primary Schools to take an assembly and was able to share my joy with Joel, who had come to the door to welcome me, for as always, I had known the presence of Jesus, meeting with our children, blessing them, and yes, I had booked to go in again in four weeks’ time. A few hours later he was gone.

Yes, I was left with a broken heart, but we had had 26 wonderful, fruitful years together, and God has been here, binding it up, - healing my wounds.

The other day I was tempted to indulge in self-pity as I thought of friends who have had long years with their spouse and more than ready to soon join them, not the long years of loneliness that I have had.

Shame on me!  I needed to remind myself and declare to you too the faithfulness of the Lord.

Yes, a month after Joel died, I was back in the same school. Struggling with tears, but with Jesus and his joy in my heart.

I had heard about ‘Walk through the Bible’ while Joel was alive but was unable to attend the training course. Now it all opened. Such joy, such love. Tears for a few years, but all part of the healing, and hopefully a ministry to others struggling in the deep waters of sorrow.

Over twenty years a widow! My tears have long dried up, and the promise the Lord gave me, that ‘I would be able to turn ready and easily to him at all times as to a friend alongside.’  This is still true. But still we are meant for a mate and there is pain in being alone.

Even in my grief I knew God had honoured Joel. Eighty-one years old, he was preaching a fortnight before he died. He hadn’t suffered and he hadn’t seen old age. I could have been left with an invalid to care for, instead of which I was well provided for, in good health and able now to get more involved in the schools’ ministry, which I so enjoyed.

Then there was our church in Porthcawl. We believed God had told us that now was the time and almost Joel’s last words were, ‘I believe God is going to do great things.’

It was soon after Joel died that I heard of Brackla’s plans to start a church for Porthcawl. The prophetic dream given to Joel was coming to pass. Grace Community Church is indeed the fruitful bough God had shown us, from the beginning, and I am privileged to be in membership with them, still able to pray and encourage.

I am so thankful for you faithful widows who have been such a shining example to me of living as overcomers. May we still be encouragers to others. I may be in a Care Home, but Jesus is with and in me and I know He has sent me to bless others as well as to be cared for, so let us learn day by day to give thanks in everything. God is good, in it all.

THE KISS

Butterfly gentle caress

 on the brow of the sleeping child

Father heart strong embrace

for the son turned again from the wild

 

Peace in the place of warfare

                 Tears kissed from the sorrowful one

 Ardent strength of the lover who knows

                life is only begun

 

But what of the kiss of our Maker

                breathing life in the form he had made?

And the worshipful kiss of the maiden

                In whose arms as a babe he was laid?

The cost of the kiss of our Saviour

                crossing out all the wrongs we have done?

And the bliss of the kiss of our Lord for his Church

                At the marriage feast of the Lamb?

 

 

Asked when he last gave his wife flowers, my husband replied that he gave me flowers every day –
‘two-lips’. After Joel’s death, setting out to see the tulip field of Holland, God gave me this fragrant meditation

 

 ‘Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.’ Psalm 85:10