A Broken Heart

The year two thousand and twenty was supposed to be another great one. I had so much planned. Ryan was entering his senior year. It hurt my heart to know that after this year, our family dynamic would change forever. I felt the urgency to give him more joy and memories to pad him against the difficulties that would inevitably come with adulthood. I planned to send him, Sean, Chloe and Nathan to Education week in Provo. I planned our great, last family vacation. I planned a senior year full of fun and family time. 

 

The pandemic was an unwelcome complication. It cancelled all my great plans. Additionally, Ryan had been doing fantastic in school. My relationship with him had never been stronger. He was funny, hard working, and devoted to the Lord. Cancelled school changed his behavior. Without strict structure he started failing his classes, staying up all night, sleeping all day, becoming defensive and irritable, and arguing with me constantly. These things made my life harder, but they couldn’t crack my optimism. I was certain the hard times would pass quickly, but nothing prepared me for Nathan being unfairly cheated out of his job. 

 

I’m not going to go into detail about this situation. Prayer and reflection have taught me that anger and the search for justice never bring joy. I could write about the unfairness and focus on all the reasons it was undeserved, but the inevitable outcome would be to stoke feelings that I know do not come from the Lord. I chose to let go of the anger, forgive those responsible, and accept the circumstances as the will of my loving, omniscient, Heavenly Father. 

 

I suppose in some ways, I am actually at fault. I was very comfortable in my life. I loved my home. I was surrounded by amazing friends. I adored the children's schools and teachers. We were taking the teeagers to the temple weekly with amazing friends and making enough money to do things for others that I never thought I’d be able to do. I loved my calling. I was blissfully happy in every aspect of my life and didn’t want anything to change. In these perfect circumstances, I began feeling the call to pray that I could become something better.

 

I’ve often heard people talk about praying for trials. I understood the reasoning behind those prayers. At a certain point my gratitude to the Lord for the beautiful life I was living became overpowering. I sorrowed that I could not do enough to show him how much I loved him and his gospel. I recognized, to a point, my own weaknesses and wanted more than anything to be better. I never did pray for trials. I did, however, pray that the Lord would give me every experience I needed to become who I was capable of being. I prayed for humility and patience. I prayed to be a better person, fully acknowledging that these traits were coaxed out in a refiner’s fire. I didn't want to suffer, but I did want to be much better as a person, even if that improvement required suffering. 

 

When Nate lost his job, it hurt. I would go through times of purposeful searching for answers contrasted by periods of mourning for the life I loved and the future I had envisioned for myself. I remember one day spending a few hours mapping each of the places Nate was interviewing for work and finding the nearest temples. I finally acknowledged that our weekly temple trips were not going to be happening any more after our move. It hurt. I was absolutely certain they had been a powerful source of protection for my kids. I tried to find a room to be alone and just cry, but Sean found me. He didn’t say a word. He just sat down next to me, put one arm around my shoulder and let me cry. 

 

In those first months, it was a roller coaster. I prayed to know the will of the Lord. I prayed for strength. I obsessively searched for jobs. I looked at houses and researched every single city that seemed like a remote possibility. I cleaned out closets and got rid of so many possessions that were cluttering our home. I fed the kids meals carefully prepared to use food storage items that would be difficult to move. I felt pain and purpose. After a while, it all seemed a bit routine. But my heart slowly started changing. 

 

As the months stretched and we still didn’t have an answer, I stopped working on the house. I found myself telling the kids to make their own dinner, or I bought pizza. One day Nate came home from an interview excited about a job and said, “Come on, let’s look at houses.” I really didn’t want to. I wanted to lay on my bed alone. Worse, I started to wonder if the Lord even cared where our family went. I didn’t wonder if he was there, just if he had any interest in this situation or our decisions. I had never felt like he wasn’t directing my footsteps before. Why wasn’t he answering me, as he always had before, unless this was simply of no consequence to him?    Shortly after that, Nate left for another interview. He was gone for three short days, but it felt like an eternity. I barely did anything during those days. I was broken. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t even recognize myself. I knelt down to pray and asked God why I couldn’t feel like me. 

 

When I was a primary child and a young woman, various teachers had taught me the concept of sacrifice. They explained that before Jesus’ life the faithful were asked to sacrifice animals in similitude of him. But after the law of Moses was fulfilled, we were asked to give, “ a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” After reading these words, the teacher would inevitably explain that “a broken heart” was not what we were thinking. It didn’t mean the feeling we felt when someone we loved left us, or something devastating befell us. It meant that we were humble. It was during these very low days when I felt, not my world, but myself, crumbling around me that I started to wonder if the “broken heart” the Lord required might be exactly what it sounded like. 

 

I had prayed for humility, but what does that actually mean? I have long understood the concept that the atonement of Jesus Christ was necessary because it is actually impossible to understand what other people feel without having experienced their pain. Our Savior would not be qualified to judge or advocate unless he understood completely what we have experienced and why we made the choices we did. Likewise, we tend to judge everyone around us so quickly, thinking to ourselves, “If that happened to me…” and being certain how to end the sentence. But if fortune gives us a similar experience in our own lives, we usually find that what we thought we would think or do was completely wrong.

 

Perhaps a broken heart, then, can only be born of the powerlessness that leads to empathy. Perhaps being broken and having no power to lift oneself is the only way to learn that we must depend on the Lord. We are not good enough on our own. We have to rely on grace. In those few days, I came to understand that even as I bore powerful testimony of the grace of God, I had not had to depend on it. 

 

I found myself really wondering what it was that I had lost. I had simply been calling it “me.” I am happy, optimistic, faithful. I always have been. Where had it gone? My next question was where these qualities had come from in the first place. I have called them my “super power.” I forget bad things. I feel joy and gratitude all the time. I always feel led by the spirit. Because of these traits, I was sure I could handle trials even if I did not aspire to them. I was so angry, not at the circumstances nearly as much as how poorly I was handling them. 

 

The answer, of course, is that all super powers come from God. These are spiritual gifts and to one is given one, and to another is given another.  When I refer to feeling like myself, I’m actually talking about feeling the way I feel because of the gifts that I have always had from my Heavenly Father. It hurt my heart to realize that I was such a weak person that these qualities could not hold on through a small trial. 

 

Shortly before Nathan came home, I had an instructive experience. My phone rang. I glanced down at the caller id and immediately answered it, concerned about the friend on the other end. Why was this such an important moment? Because this particular person calls me from time to time, and I always groan when seeing her name on the caller id. She’s constantly negative. Nothing is ever joyful for her. I never want to talk to her because it’s never a happy conversation. But this time, on this day, I wanted to see if there was any way I could help her. I didn’t even hesitate to pick up. And that was the answer I needed. 

 

Heavenly Father answered my prayer to be a better person by stripping me of my spiritual gifts so I could empathize with someone who was blessed with different ones. He wanted me to recognize that these qualities I have are not mine alone. They are gifts from him. We all gain a little pride in the exercise of our gifts, which were given to us so we could more effectively serve other people. But sometimes, when we have been so blessed, we begin to think things that are easy for us ought to be as easy for everyone else. We do not recognize how privileged we are and how great our responsibility is. 

 

I think all my teachers were wrong, at least, for me. For me, a broken heart is indeed what it sounds like. A broken heart made me realize how much I need Him.