A Prayer for God’s Perfect Love in the Midst of Heartache

Tears are the price you pay for loving and risking its loss, but love anyway! In her book, The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom, shared her first heartbreak and the words of her father that helped her find a way through her pain. As parents, we struggle for ways to reassure our children that they will survive heartbreak, but few have found a way to honor and use the pain of loss to keep love alive. Again we find the role of faith in calling us to a higher ground where we treasure memories that make life worth living. Enjoy Corrie’s powerful memory of a father’s wisdom:

’Corrie,’ father began. ‘do you know what hurts so very much (about having someone you love reject you for another)? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that its stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel. God loves Karel—even more than you do—and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us the perfect way.’ … I was still in kindergarten in these matters of love. My task just then was to give up my feelings for Karel without giving up the joy and wonder that had grown with it. And so, that very hour, lying there in my bed, I whispered an enormous prayer: ‘Lord, I give to You the way I feel about Karel, my thoughts about our future—oh, You know! Everything! Give me Your way of seeing Karel instead. Help me to love him that way. That much!”

We ought to thank God for love lost, love experienced…and love sustained. What early memories of love does this rekindle from your life?

(Source: Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, Spire Books, 1971, p. 44-45)