Why?
On allowing your heart to get broken
My wife is the type of person who will adopt a one-eyed cat that came into the shelter after it got hit by a car.
She’d always wanted to get a cat.
But we already had two psychopathic Australian shepherds. One who likes to hunt prey animals and one who doesn’t like other dogs, cats or any animals around or near our property…
So it just was never going to work.
Until it did.
“I feel spiritually connected to this cat, Drew. I’m bringing it home.”
At first, I resisted, and then I signed off on it.
“If you feel that strongly, bring it home.” I said.
The cat was missing the same eye that Tiffany’s pig was missing. The pig that lived on Tiffany’s family farm in Wisconsin. The one who died a few days before the farm hosted our wedding last summer. She never got to say goodbye to her pig.
But there was something about this one-eyed cat…
Tiffany knows Althea came back as the same spirit that left her pig.
She came back to earth to say, ‘goodbye’ to Tiffany.
Tiffany brought Althea home as soon as she named her.
Why’d she name her that?
It means: "Healer," "healing," "wholesome," or "with healing power".
She was so happy to be out of the shelter and into a loving home.
But…
Two weeks later, Althea was put down in Tiffany’s arms at the vet.
Her lingering injuries from being hit by the car wasn’t allowing her to pass food through her system. She stopped eating. She was terribly backed up and it appeared likely to be from nerve damage. Meaning if she had surgery to clean her out, the problem would likely persist.
In recent days, since the humane euthanasia, Tiffany has been a wreck. Grieving. Asking, “why” over and over…
Then, God sent me a podcast to listen to, and the podcast host played this song:
I’m scared to meet you, ‘cause then, I might know you
And then once I know you, I might fall in love
And once I’m in love, then my heart is wide open
For you to walk in, drop a bomb, blow it up
So why love anything, anything, anything at all?
Why love anything at all?
If the higher I fly is the further I fall
Then why love anything at all?
-Jon Bellion, from the song, ‘Why’
A beautiful song about love.
And a warning not to resist love, as much as losing something you love might hurt.
Don’t resist it. Allow it to flow.
Why?
The podcast continued after the host played the song. Then the guest, Joe Hudson, said this when asked to respond to the lyrics he heard:
“Yeah, my thoughts are that somehow or another, the heartbreak is bad. That's the assumption in the song. That somehow the heartbreak is bad, but heartbreak is something I look forward to. It is until you realize that every time your heart breaks open, it increases your capacity to love.”
Going through heartbreak allows for healing and a greater capacity to love. What a beautiful paradox.
Death has made me think a lot about life this year.
And with the death of the 2 teams that I’m helping coach this year quickly approaching, there is one thing I’ll know for certain.
If I’m not heartbroken at the end of March, I didn’t love them enough.