If you don’t know that your heart is breaking, you will never find God. That sentence popped into my head and bade me write it down. The mind cannot contain such a sentence. Oh, it will try. It will muster up some fine piece of idiocy like, “Well, what about joy?” And I will say that joy is contained within the sorrow, but not outside of it. Jesus was a man of sorrows. Can you be less?

I have had more than one occasion on which to know my heart is breaking. It is being stretched beyond its present limits and that’s a good thing. In case you didn’t know it, the basement beckons you. My teacher instructed us to keep going down into the darkness to bring more things into the light. He promised us we would not go alone, but often it feels that way.

There is a homeless child in us, a baffled man, a broken woman. They will not be satisfied with less than mere acknowledgement. They don’t need fixing. Fixing is something done by the mind.

When my daughter died, nothing could fix the “problem” of her death. It is no longer a problem, however. I have outgrown the grief, have outlasted it. For me, writing was the key to unlock the prison door of pain. I have no hesitation in writing of her final days, as some of you know. If I don’t write of them, they are nevertheless there, undergirding each word.

I write her name on the blackboard of my heart, having been schooled in sorrow. I can’t say I know God, but I have known a few of His children.