May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in. -Mother Teresa
What does it mean to ask God to break your heart? Are we asking Him to shatter our hearts into a million pieces? Break can be defined as smashing or dividing into parts violently, but it can also be defined as an interruption of regularity and uniformity. The latter definition is what best describes our request to God. When we ask Him to break our hearts, we are asking Him to interrupt the normal disposition of the human heart.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9 NKJV. Here the heart is described as being mostly deceitful and misleading. We find that the natural tendency of the heart is to mislead our thoughts and emotions away from the things of God. When we ask God to break our hearts, we are asking him to interrupt those misleading thoughts and emotions that desire to draw us away from Him. This interruption is what allows our deceitful heart to be turned toward God’s love. His love is what leads our hearts to truth, and it is only in this truth that we align with our true identity.
A broken heart allows us to see ourselves and people through the eyes of God. Once the deceit of the heart is interrupted, we realize that we are capable of far more than we ever imagined. We can no longer casually walk past our brother or sister living on the street. We no longer see the criminal as the crime they’ve committed, but we see them as another heart yearning for an encounter with the Creator. If we are committed to pursuing purpose, we must first say to God, “Break my heart.” Once we allow God to interrupt the natural state of our heart, we will expose His love in every atmosphere and person we encounter.