Pain n' Change

I'll never forget the feeling of having a truly broken heart.

It didn't feel anything like having a cheating boyfriend like I thought it did...

It was inexplicable, physical pain.  It rushed through my veins, my soul, my very being.  I sat on the floor of the bathroom and gasped for air, wondering how on earth a person went on living after enduring something so awful.
I felt hopelessness.  I felt anger and fear.  I clutched my chest because it felt like my stomach was trying to change places with it. 

You don't forget pain like that. 

And when I was in the thick of it, I was almost certain there was no life ahead of it.  But there was.  I had to take my shaking self OUT of that bathroom.  I had to pick myself up off the floor and KEEP GOING because time had the rude audacity to not stop.
There was nowhere to go but up.

I desperately searched for a shred of hope, and when I found a shred, I inhaled it.  I began reading about porn addiction and recovery, and I started finding answers.
Months beforehand, I thought I HAD the answers, but my dalliance with the bathroom floor had schooled me otherwise.  Apparently the scripture that admonishes us to "comfort those who stand in need of comfort" does NOT admonish us to "fix those who stand in need of fixing" like I thought it did (I assumed it was a "between the lines" kind of thing).  My life felt suddenly wasteful (I'm being dramatic).
But THERE.  THERE in the books and the websites and the articles and the research that I paid money for ... I felt I finally had answers.
I shared them with a passion.  I was so eager to share the answers.  Surely others NEEDED them as much as I did! We live, after all, in a world parched for answers!

But answers are not the same as truth.
And in my quest for answers, I found truth.  I found a lot of truth, and the more truth I found the less I felt like sharing answers.  The worth of answers was sorely diminished in the Light of Truth.
I have no desire to raise my hand, to give answers.

I don't know what anyone needs.  I have no answers for them.
I don't know what my husband needs.
I can't fix myself, save myself, or rely wholly on myself.

I don't know the answers to anything, come to think of it.

But I know the truth.  The truth is: I know who knows the answers.  I trust Him because He IS the way, the light, the life, and the Truth.

This change in me is a process.  It's unfolding and frustrating and hard and so far from instant.  Sometimes I want to pull my hair out, sometimes I bump into my unchanged self, sometimes I find that The Old Me is a shell covering Who I See Myself As... and that shell is a mixture of steel and concrete and iron and a little bit of Aqua Net.

It's standing fast.
But underneath that shell, I have a determined heart and a Big Brother with a chisel. 

We'll carve Me out yet...

And that broken heart -the one I will never forget and the one I revisit every time I look into the eyes of a woman who has felt it as I have -will be new, shining, and have the ability to stand *just* as fast, yea, FASTER than my hardened shell.

I know this.
The Atonement is alive.
The Sacrifice is real.
Love is why.