The pulsating pain of a heavy heart renders many of us unable to advance the kingdom of God. Too often, fellow Christians pat us on the back with a “God is good”—in essence telling us to stuff our emotions—when really the answer is to embrace Isaiah 61.
Don’t allow the fear of embracing pain to dominate your life, songwriter Christa Black Gifford says. “Unhealed pain will become your greatest enemy if it isn’t taken to a Healer.”
Two years ago, the writer behind hits like Passion’s “One Thing Remains” and American Idol‘s Jordin Sparks’ “God Loves Ugly” lost her baby, Goldie, who was born with anencephaly, so she didn’t have her brain or entire top skull structure.
“In that moment, my heart naturally shattered into a million pieces,” Black Gifford says. “In most of Western Christian culture, we try to get other people out of their pain because we aren’t comfortable with our own. We have all these phrases like ‘God is good all the time,’ or ‘Consider it pure joy.’ But God never would have given us a Comforter if He never meant to mourn.”
Now, Black Gifford chronicles her embrace of pain and the restoration of God in her new book, Heart Made Whole.
Fear of pain is not necessarily a negative, sinful emotion, Black Gifford says. Neither is anger. The trouble is that negative feelings haunt believers when they fail to give these emotions over to the Holy Spirit. Instead, faith-filled people focus on freedom and don’t treat a broken heart first, which is contrary to the Isaiah 61 prophecy of the Messiah.
“We are stabbed on a regular basis by wounded people who wound in a fallen world,” Black Gifford says. “Our heart is a walking pin cushion, (and we are told to) just stuff it down, that God is good, when we are bleeding out all over the place.”
In this moment, we must surrender our hearts to the Holy Spirit, or Comforter, as Black Gifford calls Him.
“(Calling Him) ‘The Comforter’ feels distant and abstract,” Black Gifford says. “(But) when Comforter, the personification of Comforter comes up and puts big down blanket around you, it feels so good. We’ve done ourselves a big disservice thinking of God as 100 percent masculine, because in His feminine nature, (He is) Comforter, Nurturer. Every kid wants their mama in the first season when they are sick or hurting.”
The answer to ease the pain of a broken heart lies not within the pursuit of joy alone. Rather, we must take all our emotions, even those typically considered negative, and place them at the feet of Jesus.
Through her music and her writing, Black Gifford’s goal is to connect believers with their own hearts, which will connect them to Father God.
“(We say,) ‘God I can’t hear You, I can’t feel You,’ but we avoid ourselves to avoid pain, but He lives in the middle of pain and broken hearts,” Black Gifford says. “The best way to find the voice of God is to connect with your own heart because that’s where He made His home.”
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