Are You Using God As A Band-Aid On Your Heart?

There once was a little girl who thought she knew everything. Her mother asked her time and time (and time) again, to stop sitting on her brother’s skateboard to ride it down the steep driveway, but the girl knew better.

One day, she decided to blindfold herself and ride the skateboard down the driveway—because doing it with open eyes just wasn’t challenging enough. You can imagine her surprise when she flew down the concrete drive and smacked face-first into the metal bumper of her mother’s old Buick. You might also imagine the loud “crack” the girl heard as she was sure she broke her nose. She wouldn’t admit to her mother what she’d done to cause severe bruising on her face, or tell her that she was pretty sure she reset the bones herself.

No, this girl knew better. Instead, she allowed her mother to put a Band-Aid over her nose, when in reality, she likely needed to get an X-ray, stitches, and pain medicine.

Fast forward 34 years.

After my marriage ended, I spent more than a year working on healing my heart. I focused on it. Decided not to date (as everyone suggested I do) and concentrated instead on getting myself into a healthy emotional state so I could move on. If the truth be told, I was kind of prideful about how far I’d come in that time. I was so sure that my heart was healed and I was ready to move on emotionally, mentally, and financially that I began dating and was really enjoying the process.

Remember that blindfolded little girl hurling herself toward the back bumper of a car? I wonder now if I looked much like that in God’s eyes.

I was so determined to move forward, that I went in without my eyes fully open. Though I liked the dating process, I was not really prepared for how much it had changed since I last dated. I was really wary of letting people get to know me. If someone got too close, I just wouldn’t follow through. If I really liked someone, I began to count down the days until I was sure they would end it. Obviously, my heart was not fully healed. But I didn’t know why.

Then, as I was reading about healing—a topic that is close to most single parents—a phrase struck me like never before: God can heal your heart completely. As I read those words, it’s as if they stood off the page for me, and I knew that God was speaking to my soul.

I wasn’t healed completely because I wasn’t allowing Him full access to my heart. I was only allowing Him enough access to act much like a Band-Aid. A temporary fix that would still allow me to move on, but not reach my full potential in my next relationship because there was deeper healing that needed to occur first. I allowed Him to heal me enough to move on in my day-to-day life, but no more.

The truth is that God will only heal us as much as we allow. If we stop the process, or only give Him access to a point, we don’t experience the full measure of healing that can occur. And so we will likely go into the next relationship (and the next, and the next) still not getting what our heart most desires because our heart is not ready to accept it. It’s broken, and being held together by the little amount of healing that we’ve allowed—much like a Band-Aid trying to heal a broken nose. So while our heart will still function — it can still love and care, and even connect — it won’t connect in the way we most long for it to because it’s not ready.

Have you allowed God to fully heal your heart? Or have you rushed through the healing process to push toward moving on with life? Ask Him to show you where your heart stands. Then be open to revert a little, to allow the full measure of healing that He wants you to accept so that you can then go on to experience the full measure of His blessing. There’s nothing He wants to give you more.