Good Questions: A Broken Heart, Biblical Miracles

Healing for a Broken Heart

Dear Dr. Tom: My girlfriend just broke up with me. We’ve been together two years. Now she wants to be single again. I feel lost, as if my life isn’t worth living without her. Can God help me to get her back?—K.D., Houston, Texas

DEAR K.D.: You’ll have to pardon me for being a minister here instead of a relationship counselor, but you sound so depressed that I worry about what you might be contemplating, especially since you said life isn’t worth living without her.

If you are thinking about suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), anytime day or night, or chat online. You can also text the Crisis Text Line at 741741. It’s free, confidential, and always available.

Okay, now let’s talk about what drives people to date, mate, and separate. I’m probably a lot older than you, but I recall the exhilarating early days of a relationship. It’s a kind of sweet madness when the world seems to rotate around one other person. But when a couple drifts apart— or breaks up abruptly like you did—the universe falls into disarray. A song from my high school days, written by Skeeter Davis, proclaimed: “Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when you said, ‘Goodbye.’”

Except the world doesn’t end. You’re here, and you have many good days ahead of you. Unity can’t fix broken relationships, but prayer can help you heal a broken heart. A positive affirmation to meditate upon might be: I remember all the good, and I move forward with faith that the best is yet to come.

You are not alone. Friends and family walk with you. Best of all, the cosmos is brimming with opportunities to love and be loved. Life will surprise and exhilarate you again. (Also, be sure to read the next letter.)

Do You Believe in Miracles?

Dear Dr. Tom: Do you believe in miracles? The Bible sounds like a book of myths with its talking serpents, parting of the Red Sea, demons, and angels. If I need a miracle, I don’t think the Bible world is any help today.—Doubtful Hopeful, Biloxi, Mississippi

DEAR HOPEFUL: Okay, let’s talk miracles. You identified the problem with biblical stories quite Intriguing, insightful answers to your thorny theological queries succinctly. Those folks lived in lands immersed in magical thinking. Scientist-author Carl Sagan, Ph.D., called that kind of consciousness a “demonhaunted world.” Magical thinking lingers today. There are technical differences between magic and miracles, but both call upon external powers to perform some act contrary to the natural order.

In biblical days, not much was known about medicine, and treatments for illness were steeped in ritual acts performed by priests or shamans. Miracles were claimed when something unexpected happened to improve circumstances. Sudden rains ended the drought; hostile armies marched in a different direction; fevers broke just as the patient appeared near death’s door.

Today we turn to medical science for healing and to engineers to build bridges rather than to gods to part the waters, but we can also apply spiritual principles to enhance our health and well-being. When life hands us hard choices or painful results, we turn to God for comfort, and sometimes to seek a better outcome, or a way to handle whatever comes.

So, you ask if I believe in miracles? Definitely not! I firmly believe there are no miracles—until they happen. Sometimes life and God surprise me, and I have no rational answers for what has occurred. I could list a few dozen instances of this irrational outbreaking of “miracles” in my life alone—outrageous good blossoming from the desert of life. I don’t understand it; I don’t believe it’s possible. But there it is, again and again. God is not bound by the impossible or my limited thinking.

If you’ll allow me a deep dive into contradictory theology, I find myself wondering if God (by whatever name) is leaning over the ramparts of heaven, snickering. Thank God there are no miracles, because when they happen—it’s a miracle!

This article appeared in Unity Magazine®.