Fight for Your Heart
When the world
crushes you with dream-killing deceit,
ripping back the curtains of reality
to show you the trickster lurking in
shadows
promising happiness and home
yet offering emptiness in the end…
Fight for your heart.
When the world
laughs at you in a soul-draining circle,
as you stand in the middle
feeling alone, awkward,
different
because you are strange
and they never let you forget it…
Fight for your heart.
When the world
breaks your love in glass-shattering pain,
and the chest throbs with
the splinters of rejection and happily
never-afters
in this messy world
so unlike the fairy tales of youth…
Fight for you heart.
When the world
steals your cherished ones in bone-chilling finality
before you even say goodbye,
and you feel the aching chasm
and weep with the anguish of light
extinguished
by the overwhelming darkness
of tragedy unspeakable…
Despite it all,
Fight for your heart.
11-12-14
***
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
The heart is the most important part of ourselves. The heart is where we truly live, move, breathe, feel. If we have shut off our hearts, then we are living deadly. It’s so hard to keep one’s heart open. It’s so hard, after experiencing some of the disillusionment and pain life can bring, to keep the heart alive.
So often, when we grow up, we shut the heart off. In youth, the heart is something we can easily feel and live out of because we haven’t truly felt the pain of dreams shattered or hearts broken. As we grow up, though, bitterness and cynicism can set in because life is not what we thought it would be. Maybe for some people, it is. But for many, life throws us unexpected tragedies and twists that leave us reeling. So we start closing our hearts and living hardened, safe existences.
We used to have faith in the world. We used to believe in the ultimate goodness of mankind. We trusted very easily, we were so loyal and loved so quickly–a lot of the times to people who weren’t loyal or loving back. Now, not so much. We come to face with the reality of this world, and it can be, quite frankly, very heartbreaking.
So we have to fight for our hearts. We have to fight for the Beauty. We have to fight with every ounce of strength for the Beauty of the heart. Faith. Hope. Forgiveness. Joy. LOVE. It’s these things that keep the heart alive, beating and throbbing, with life abundant.
So fight for your heart, friends. It may be the biggest battle you ever face, especially if you’ve been through extreme loss or tragedy, but it’s worth it.
3 comments
Thank you, Teryn! I really needed this reminder today.
Aprrove
[…] After Thailand, I began pouring into relationships here in Colorado and suddenly found I wasn’t as alone as I thought I was. I was surrounded by people who cared deeply about me—both new and old. With God’s help, I could change my life to live in love. It is never too late. It just takes the choice to heal, to thrive, and to change. It takes bravery to fight for one’s heart. […]