I recently lost my best friend. I’ve been receiving some cards and notes in the mail, but honestly I find them very difficult to read. As much as I enjoy sending cards to others, they’ve always been hard for me to receive. I once put an unopened birthday card in a stack of mail and found it a year later. Maybe it’s the written form that makes things too real. I’m not sure.

The other day I opened a card from my CPE group-mate Sarah that had arrived a few days before. I’m so glad I opened it. In the card Sarah shared “A Blessing for the Brokenhearted” by Jan Richardson:

Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger or that it is better to have this pain than to have done without this love.

Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound when every day our waking opens it anew.

Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this —

as if it knows the only cure for love is more of it,

as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,

as if it trusts that its own stubborn and persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless.

These words are so comforting to me. They express exactly what I’m experiencing now — my reality is that love was taken away from me, but now that emptiness is being met with more love. I’ve always cared for my friend’s mother, but now it’s almost as if I’ve taken on all the love my friend had for his mother as my responsibility to live out for him. I’m witnessing regrets and brokenness in his family being transformed into peace and reconciliation. I’m receiving more love and daily support from my sister than I ever have. I’m finding myself asking for help from friends and being met with more gracious care and concern than I could have imagined. My loss and pain and grief is co-existing with an abundance of love flowing in and out. This place feels new and uncomfortable, but perhaps it’s the way.

May you too experience an abundance of love this day to fill those parts of you that are in need of healing.

Blessings & peace to you,
Jennifer
CPE Intern