dailydatewithgod

Functioning under the belief that my heart had suffered too much injury and I needed to keep it under lock and key to protect it was a logical choice given the circumstances.  I had just had my heart broken in two.  I was in college and it was the ending of the relationship between myself and my first love.  I remember telling God, “Well, I guess it’s just you and me again.” I vowed I would not open my heart up again until I was certain that the person I was with was someone who I would be with for a very long time.  I was young and hurt and I did not realize I was setting myself up to suffer even more.  It did not occur to me that my desire to protect my heart essentially cut off my own access to it.  I thought I was doing the prudent thing.  After all, my heart genuinely felt like it had been not just broken but yanked out, cut into a million little pieces and then tossed back at me.  In recovery and establishing a more authentic relationship with God I see the fallible safety measures I set up for myself.  I gave myself an excuse from opening up my heart again to myself or others.  I was in a lot of pain and practicing a lot of self-destruction, like someone who did not have access to her own heart by the time I humbly crawled into recovery.  I also did not have the vaguest idea at the time the other elements from my past with which I had not dealt.  Now I realize as God has shown me on our dates that my perception of needing to be the one to protect my heart, while well-meaning, actually caused me to keep re-injuring myself.  God showed me that the protection I was seeking was actually in place from the beginning of my existence.  God set it up so that no matter what we experience in life, our hearts cannot be truly injured.  It can feel that way and we can think it so, but our human experience cannot change our spiritual essence  living vibrantly in our hearts.  I built up walls and put layers of ice and chains on top of my heart and then lost sight of the truth of my heart and only saw my protective measures.  After a while I figured there was no point in looking to see if anything else was there.  God led me gently into breaking down and letting go of the layers of protection I had set up around my heart to reveal a light still burning brightly with love always protected by its never-ending connection to love itself.