How Do You Heal a Broken Heart

Kristi was just a girl from west Georgia; she wasn’t the prettiest, but she was very talented and had a caring personality. A bit of a dreamer, mostly of getting out of that small town and doing something with her life that mattered one day. Kristi had been dating Jay, a boy from a neighboring town she met in night school, and she was sure he was the love of her life. Jay was a bit older and had plans to join the Navy after high school. He joined the Navy and shortly after asked Kristi to marry him. She excitedly said yes and they decided to marry after she graduated high school.

For many months they talked about plans and what they would have at the wedding and where they would go for their honeymoon. They decided the wedding should be in September. In the late summer, most of the plans had been made for the wedding. Things were being bought and made, people were hired, and deposits were made. Her gown was the most beautiful she had ever seen, and the finishing touches were almost complete. Kristi and her mom had just picked out the invitations and they were perfect in every way. Everything was in cream or off-white with a hint of peach and mint green. She was so excited that Jay was coming home soon so she could show him all the progress that had been made. The visit went well, and he approved of every detail that she could show him. Then the call came the day she would spend the rest of her life trying to figure out. It wasn’t a call informing her that he’d been injured or killed, that would have been easy to reconcile in time. It was a call from him saying he couldn’t get married; he had gotten someone else pregnant and needed to take care of his mistake. No apology just an explanation and a goodbye. Is this how real men handle their business? Didn’t he owe her more than that? Kristi was devastated and unable to make sense of anything at that point; all she could do was cry and question why this happened. Kristi wanted desperately to speak with him to get an answer, an explanation, but she knew in her heart that day would never come.

Weeks passed and she finally was able to get out of the house. Kristi was finally able to go to work and think about getting out more but wasn’t ready to go to school again. Kristi decided to try being social because she knew that staying home and crying all the time wasn’t healthy. She didn’t have that many friends, so part of becoming more social meant making more friends, which she did slowly. They were too old for her, or at least her parents thought so, but Kristi was determined to live her life. She ignored her parents’ warnings and kept her new friends which led to a relationship that was not only unhealthy, but it also caused problems between her and her parents.

Kristi moved out of her parents’ home and they didn’t speak for a very long time. Kristi needed to find peace and heal, and she didn’t feel that she could do that with her parents always asking her questions about going back to school. It was one of the loneliest times of her life, but a choice she made. She eventually realized that she needed to heal her relationship with her parents. Once things were back to a more normal state with them, Kristi decided it was time to move on with the rest of her life. She was having a hard time with this part. How do you move on after having your heart broken and your life flipped upside down? She didn’t have the answers but thought that maybe God was telling her that she needed to move on in the form of a relationship, which she did. Kristi learned one thing from this: you can’t fix a broken heart with a different relationship, especially when your heart hasn’t healed. Broken hearts take time to heal, and every heart is different; some take days, months or decades. Some never heal, but that doesn't mean they can't love.