God’s heart is breaking for our hearts.

The depth of His love for us struck me in a different way today. God, the Creator and Master of the universe, loves us- madly, intensely, crazily. He feels our brokenness, mourns with us over lost dreams, and weeps with us when we’re hopeless. He reaches out to draw us in, even when we turn away. And He loves us all the same.

We’re not crying out to a distant, aloof God when we pray. He’s beside us, feeling our heartbreak more intensely than I ever gave Him credit for. Like a protective father, He wants to fix us, and this fractured world we live in.

But do we let Him?

Sometimes I find myself shrinking from Him, as though I think it’s possible to hide. On days like that I’ll pray for anything but what’s going on inside my own heart. I’m afraid to be vulnerable with Him, afraid to speak those “heart cries” into being. I know that once those words leave my lips, I can’t take them back. And they’re just out there- suspended between God and I. No longer can they be protected from disappointment within the walls of my own heart.

It’s on days like these that prayer makes me feel raw and vulnerable and exposed. And it’s uncomfortable. But strangely, since Forty has begun I’ve been embracing this discomfort. Welcoming it, almost. Because I know that once I admit these prayers to God, we’ve reached a new level of intimacy.

I want to be like Nehemiah. He wasn’t afraid to show his “sadness of heart” in the courts of the king. Nehemiah laid his desires out there to King Artaxerxes. And God honored Nehemiah for the honesty and courage, prompting Artaxerxes to grant him favor beyond what Nehemiah could have ever expected.

Our heavenly King desires this same yielding and submissive attitude from us. He wants us to lay our hearts at the foot of his throne, to cry out to Him with our deeply hidden longings. He wants our walls to come down.

And He’ll meet us there, in the midst of all the rubble.