...but I'm hurting in this safe place.

Sometimes I feel so dumb.

"Am I really here... again?" I wonder.

"When will I learn? What will it take? This hurts so much. I do not want to feel this. Not now. Not ever again. How do I keep ending up back here? I feel so foolish."

Sin causes my heart to ache. It doesn't matter what kind of sin it is. My heart feels empty, alone, shattered, lost. And I would do anything to not feel those things. At some point in life I learned that if I can stop feeling, my sin won't matter--mine or anyone else's. If I am hard, I won't hurt.

Such is my battle. I battle for my feelings. I won't deny that at times I'd rather reverse the process... go back to the numbness. It gets harder to embrace my heart within me and move forward in this discovery of love. The deeper in I get, the more risk I feel... and, at times, the more pain I experience. To trust others is risky business. To believe the best requires a soft heart. I don't always feel safest with a soft heart, and I always want to feel safe. Lately I've been finding myself in these terribly painful experiences where I literally want to rip my heart out because it's causing me such severe pain. I know that the pain is not isolated to one or even two events in my life... that most of it has really little to do with anything present in my life at all--but that most of it is years and years of anger, sadness, grief, and longing finally pouring itself out of me. Being in a place in life, with people who care, creates a place that is safe to finally let myself feel honestly. It's new, and scary, and I'm not quite sure that I'm sold on it yet. But I am convinced that God wants me to heal--that He wants my heart to be free. And so I hurt.