Article June 22, 1998 Issue

Heal the broken heart

We can feel the love, joy, and goodness God is giving us.

By Lyle R. Young

When the heroine in the children's classic The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, comes to live at an English manor, she hears in the wind a sound like someone wandering and crying, lost on the moor. She eventually traces the crying to a secluded room, discovering there the heir of the estate, a young, sickly boy whose widowed father almost totally neglects him. That horrible sound had been caused by nothing more mysterious than the deep unhappiness of a little boy.

Sometimes a broken heart can make wretched sounds in real life, too. Maybe in the form of emotional heaviness or a sick body. But Christian Science uniquely equips one to heal the heart—and emphasizes the importance of doing so. Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, states, "If we would open their prison doors for the sick, we must first learn to bind up the broken-hearted" (p. 366).

The master Christian, Christ Jesus, set the standard for all time for healing broken hearts. The passage from Isaiah that he read aloud in the synagogue at the start of his ministry established the tone of his career: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised" (Luke 4:18). Before raising a widow's only son, he compassionately told her, "Weep not" (Luke 7:13). Fulfilling his promise "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4), he healed a man lying helpless at the pool of Bethesda who had had an infirmity for thirty-eight years (see John 5:2–9).

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