I picked up the copy of Ed Underwood's book When God Breaks Your Heart and considered reading it, but I'm tired of self-help books.
I also know better. While I agree with Ed's use of biblical principles and personal revelations to impart lessons, God has broken my heart so many times that I can't take the reminder.I know what to do when God breaks your heart, though I didn't intend to to know. I'm human. I don't want to learn God's lessons when I'm suffering. I want relief.
Alas, suffering, even long, chronic suffering is a part of life. If you haven't had the 'privilege' of suffering in that way, you will. Live long enough.
God will break your heart.
When you exercise religiously, eat right, don't smoke or drink or do anything that motherfuckers say you shouldn't do, and then become the first of your friends to get the cancer diagnosis.
When you study for the Bar exam and fail it three straight times. I know a woman who made all A's throughout high school and college, earned induction into Phi Beta Kappa, and flunked that motherfucker six times. Talk about heart breaking. She's about 56 today. She finally passed it about fifteen years ago, and today is a successful partner in a bankruptcy law firm
When you lose your high-five to six figure job, your wife leaves you, and the only work you can find is a Walmart, where you earn a third of what you did. Does it get any worse than working at Walmart? No offense. I've worked there.
You ever suffered so through a circumstance for a long time, prayed faithfully for Gods intervention, and He took so long to move in your relief that you wondered if He existed?
Job did too. Job, whose story is located in the bible between the book of Esther and the book of Psalms, was referred to as, "blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil". He had seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and a large number of servants. He was called the greatest man of the people of the East.
A B.C. (before Christ) baller with a heart gold. WHERE does a guy like him exist? This guy would offer sacrifices to God in anticipation of of his kids sin, for their forgiveness.
Essentially, in the span of one day, God, at Satan's request, allowed Satan to kill all of his children and servants, carry off all of his livestock, and inflict Job with painful sores from head to toe.
How many people do you that would endure that and not want to die? See, we claim to love life so much, but what if your life becomes really fucked, without repair, for a long ass time? Something to think about, huh? If God will break the heart of a 'blameless' man, you know he'll break your lying, scheming, cheating, murdering, drugging, selfish heart.
Afterward, three of Jobs friends visited him, tried to console him but he's angry and lashes out at them. They then scold him, he curses the day he was born, his wife tells him to, "curse God and die", he wishes for his death, is scolded by God, and repents.
The book gives no definite account of how long Job endured this time in his life, but at one point he says, "man born of woman his of few days and much trouble". How long would you have to suffer, and how much would it have to hurt for you to say that?
The way we worship life, probably a long fucking time.
Eventually God restored Job, and in the latter part of his life gave him fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. Job also sired seven more sons and three more daughters, who were referred to as the most beautiful women in the land. God gave him, "twice as much as he had before".
You know what to do when God breaks your heart? Wait.
Copyright2011Ted'sBigIdeas
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