Dear Broken Me,

Dear Broken Me:

You thought you knew how to protect your heart. You thought you were in control. You thought if you picked them, you wouldn’t get hurt. You thought if you had a hard exterior, you could keep them away.

You were wrong!!!

Everything you did to protect yourself from them pulled you away from the only “Him” that really knew how to love you. When you cried yourself to sleep at night, it was Him who saw you and allowed His heart to break when yours did. It was the blood of His Son that He sent to save you and protect you from yourself. But you didn’t know Him so you didn’t know what real love was. You tried to create it for yourself. You did everything you thought you could to gain something you thought you never had.

Of course, you knew that your parents and family loved you but the expectations they had of you became more pressure to perform instead of just learning to embrace the beauty of who you were. You allowed what people thought you should do turn you into who they wanted you to be. Every person you met, met a different person because you became what they thought of you. Your identity was unknown because you didn’t know your Creator. You searched aimlessly in the darkness, even though it hurt you, because it was comfortable. Lying down with a man didn’t bring you pleasure but you thought it proved something: that you were worth being with.

It hurt you; it broke you, when the first man you loved couldn’t be consistent. You didn’t know then but your father was doing all that he knew how to do. If you would have known that he used alcohol as a way to numb the pain he felt, maybe you wouldn’t have blamed yourself when he didn’t keep the promises he made. You didn’t have the chance to see what he went through so you went out searching to get what you thought you didn’t get from him. You made excuses for him because it was scary to try to get to know him. You thought, if your dad didn’t want to be around you, why would anyone else? You punished yourself by lying with those men, even though you thought you were protecting yourself. You gave your body to them because that was much easier than actually giving them your heart. Having an abortion was the last thing you thought you would ever do but, again, you tried to do what you thought what keep them when they weren't yours to keep.

But it wasn’t just men that you demeaned your worth for; it was for anything and anyone. Settling for the least had become your usual because expecting the best always led to disappointment for you. You settled in jobs, dropping out of college, and in friendships. You had no standards because those were for perfect women who didn’t give themselves away for nothing in return. Standards were for the women with perfect childhoods and lived up to the plans their families had for them. They weren’t for you because it was too much work to make someone else meet standards that you didn’t have the courage to meet yourself.

Just when you thought life was turning around for you, you were happy, you were back in college, you married a man that loved you and you were pregnant. You had been given the opportunity to bring another life into the world, to mold them and love them. Something would be yours, from beginning to end. Then the pain came. A pain that you couldn’t describe, but was not of this world. This pain wasn’t just pain in your body, even though you knew your child was dying; it reached down into your soul and snatched your hope away. The 2^nd time you were numb and refused to feel. You buried what resembled pain and drank your problems away. You resigned to be a walking zombie and barely live your life. You let life happen to you until you became a shell of who you used to be. You hid from yourself because you couldn’t bear to deal with the thought that you may be getting exactly what you deserved when the doctor said your body could not conceive or carry a child.

Then one day, you got tired of continuing to let people break what you had already cracked. Eventually, your heart became so bruised that you couldn’t even recognize the reflection you saw in the mirror. You became so disgusted with yourself as a woman, and as a wife, because you couldn’t hide anymore. You started to wear your brokenness like a badge of honor, so much so, that the man God blessed you with began to pull away from you. Yes, he loved you; yes, he chose you; yes, he provided for you and protected you…but that wasn’t enough. Although you were a wife by title, you weren’t a wife in your heart. You treated your husband like a one-night stand because you still operated out of the fear that you had to protect yourself because he would hurt you too. He was brave enough to try to help you the best he could. That wasn’t enough to heal you because it wasn’t him that created you. 

You finally realized that another creation didn’t know what you were made for because they weren’t the Creator. You stopped looking for validation in people because they didn’t have the ability to make you whole.  Your wounded, exposed heart had enough. And on THAT day, you decided to strip. You stripped away everything that hurt you (including your own choices), you stripped away all of the masks that you had become so comfortable wearing, and you stripped away everything you thought you knew about God and just let Him love you. You were safe, but scared, of where this would lead you. You held on to the hope of a scripture you heard and that would be where you will turn for years to come: Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Your journey is not easy because there are things you have to learn to become who God says you are. You spent so long being who people said you were so you can appreciate where this will take you. I promise that everything you’ve gone through is more than worth it. You’re better now than you ever thought was possible.

With All My Love,

Whole Me