Arrow’d

The title of this blog is a humorous allusion to the “Teen Girl Squad” cartoons on homestarrunner.com, but the subject itself is fairly serious.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of my thoughts in starting the book The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge.  I’m only a couple more chapters along, but God is using it to reveal more and more of why I struggle with certain things.  The third chapter, titled “The Message of the Arrows”, brought me to tears as I began to understand what has been at work in my life to bring me to a point of closing off my heart almost completely.  In this chapter, Brent Curtis shares some of the arrows– the moments of pain, of disillusionment, etc– that had embedded themselves in his heart over the years creating festering wounds that affected his life in a number of ways.  The “message” of these Arrows is quite different from the message of the Romance that is also playing out in our lives.

“The Arrows strike at the most vital places in
our hearts, the things we care most about.
The deepest questions we ever ask are directly related to our heart’s
greatest needs and the answers life gives us shape our images of ourselves, of
life, and of God. Who am I? The Romance
whispers that we are someone special, that our heart is good because it is made
for someone good; the Arrows tell us we are a dime a dozen, worthless, even
dark and twisted, dirty. Where is life to be found? The Romance tells us life will flourish when
we give it away in love and heroic sacrifice.
The Arrows tell us that we must arrange for what little life there may
be, manipulating our world and all the while watching our backs. “God is good,” the Romance tells us. “You can release the well-being of your heart
to him.” The Arrows strike back, “Don’t
ever let life out of your control,” and they seem to impale with such
authority, unlike the gentle urges of the Romance, that in the end we are driven
to find some way to contain them. The
only way seems to be to kill our longing for the Romance, much in the same way
we harden our heart to someone who hurts us.
If I don’t want so much, we
believe, I won’t be so vulnerable. Instead of dealing with the Arrows, we
silence the longing. That seems to be
our only hope. And so we lose heart (The Sacred Romance, p. 32-33).”

How true those statements have been in my life!  My Arrows have pierced the parts of my heart where my sense of value and worth lie; they have embedded themselves in my longing for intimacy.  As the wounds festered, I became convinced that I was unworthy of the intimacy I longed for, not only with the people in my life but also with the One who desired to romance me.  So I “killed my longing for the Romance”, choosing to believe that I could never have what I really wanted.

“To lose hope has the same effect on our heart as
it would be to stop breathing. If only
there were someone to help us reconcile our deepest longings with our greatest
fears (p. 33).”

Although the idea scares me, I’ve been praying that God would help me to identify and remove the arrows that still lie embedded in my heart.  I’m becoming more and more aware of my longing for the Romance, and this time I don’t want to silence it, but allow it to bring healing to my wounded heart.