The Black Heart

The anger raged and swelled inside my chest. Trying to control the tumult, fear frustration and every other negative emotion was taking its toll. I was no longer able to contain the intensity of emotions that rose within my mind, body and soul. My black heart was taking control.
It didn’t have to be this way. In fact it wasn’t always this way. My heart was once clean and fresh, new as the day my Maker formed me.
The first nasty bruise on my heart came as early as grade school, mostly out of my own inhibitions, the constraints I put on my own life. That dark bruise came at the first pangs of rejection and it was never given the love and compassion to heal before the barrage of angry red tears and rips began to appear. The bruising increased with intensity as the self-inflicted, self-loathing, hate and self pity increased with alarming regularity. Infection caused irreparable harm as the fear and pain festered in the heart. The rejection by my peers, not feeling like my thoughts, my life mattered to this angry world. All those angry, vicious emotions were given safe harbor in my tortured heart. I repeated daily the insults that were slung at me at school. They rolled around and around inside of my head torturing my dreams.
All those words, actions and thoughts against the heart turned it into a darkened, dead organ, dark and brittle as charcoal. It was dead, no longer a viable use to the body. Rejected by body, spirit, and soul, but fearing the void would not be filled I clung to it like a life-line, unable to give it up. Every scar, cut, bruise, every ounce of pain represented my past, my life, who I was to this point. To give up my blackened heart was to give up myself. I would disappear and not matter, my life would be for nothing. My last link to a so-called life, what I called living.
I did not know how close my rescue was. I was not aware that with one cry to the Father, the one who formed me with His loving hands, He was the one to replace my fragile, bitter, battered and bruised heart. He, with all surgical precision, practice and skill could transform my hate, rage and pain into pure perfection. With no mistakes, no faults, I could have a pure, beating heart with life breathed straight from the mouth of the Creator. Who could describe the sweetness of that moment, the fresh, pure beating of a new heart? Restored to pump life in a pure untainted sense, my black, brittle heart was reborn and renewed with one cry, one pleading, sobbing cry. I was reborn, new and fresh, loved with an intensity I had never known.
Now it was my job to protect my heart at the first signs of bruising or pain. I need to run to my Father and have Him cleanse me again and again. I don’t want to return to harboring a dead and scarred useless heart. I never again want to grow accustomed to harboring the rage that always lurked beneath the surface. I never again want to forget the sweetness and purity of my new heart.