Hearts are fragile

Situation: You're cleaning a wine glass made from some of the finest glass in the world. The stem makes a knife look clumsy. You are holding it as carefully as you can, turning it while wiping the inside with a dish towel. Then, all of a sudden, the glass shatters in your hands. Shards log themselves into your flesh and all over the sink and counter. Your nerves send shock waves up to your brain and your vision flickers as the pain registers with the rest of your body. Now you look at your hands, colored red, and you don't know what to do.

Translation: You try to handle your emotional heart, one of the most precious things we have as humans, with care. It is the well-spring of life. Each relationship affects it. You "tend" to it and keep it sheltered from certain things, like dishwashers (or in this case, a shallow relationship), yet something happens to make it break. You have no idea how that happened because you were not being careless and there was reason to believe that you were doing exactly what you should have been doing. Regardless of the reasons and the logic, you are stuck with a mess and you are mystified.

I'm not just talking about romantic relationships. You all know that backwards and forwards. There is another aspect of the relationship that I was referring to, which is the relationship with the people you interact with every day. There is a fear, an underlying fear that paralyzes us from truly talking with someone or investing time in someone. We would much rather know what we will gain from a relationship at the beginning than not know anything. Here is the challenge: what if you spent less time worrying about what you'll get from something or someone. In the day-to-day relationships, you will get "shards of glass" in your proverbial hands. Good news, though. The glass comes out and you heal.

This is what I am scared of, though, as my student teaching winds down. How will it affect me when I realize that I will not be in these people's lives anymore? How will that affect my ability to pour into future students and co-workers? I guess as my college experience begins to close, I realize that no relationship is a given. I will not have a campus full of people for the next four years, nor will I have a classroom full of the same students. I can't have it all but I know that I am called to love. Even though my heart is fragile, it can be made stronger... I have to let the work be done.